TREK: A Self-Hosted Trip Planner That Actually Keeps Everything in One Place
You've probably got your itinerary in a spreadsheet, bookings scattered across email confirmations, a shared costs tab someone started and abandoned, and a photo album that never got organized. Planning a trip with other people usually means juggling four or five tools that don't talk to each other. TREK is an open-source, self-hosted app that tries to pull all of that into one place you actually own.
What It Does
TREK describes itself as having grown "from a travel planner into a whole ecosystem for trips." At its core, it's a web app for planning trips together in real time on a live map. From there, it covers the surrounding work: building hikes, tours, and road trips, tracking bookings, splitting shared costs, managing packing, writing a journal, and laying out a photo book.
It runs self-hosted and ships as a Docker image, so you're deploying it on your own hardware rather than signing up for someone else's service. It works on the web and on your phone, and it functions offline. There's also a built-in AI assistant, though the README notes that most of the feature set beyond the basics is controlled by an admin toggle. Lists, Costs, Documents, Collab, Tours, Vacay, and Atlas ship enabled; Journey, Collections, MCP, the AI assistant, AI Parsing, Road trip, Dawarich, and AirTrail ship disabled and can be switched on.
The README also mentions day plans where you can drag places and notes around, which suggests a fairly hands-on planning surface rather than a static list.
Why It's Cool
-
It's a real ecosystem, not a single-purpose tool. Plenty of apps do maps. Plenty do expense splitting. TREK's pitch is that the planning, the bookings, the costs, the packing, the journal, and the photo book all live in the same place. For a group trip, that's the difference between one link to share and five.
-
Real-time collaboration on a live map. Planning together is the stated core, and the live map is the centerpiece. If you've ever tried to coordinate an itinerary over a group chat, you know why a shared, editable map matters.
-
Feature toggles keep it from being overwhelming. This is a smart design decision. Rather than forcing every module on every user, admins decide what's active. If you just want a planner and a cost tracker, you don't have to wade through the photo book and AI features. It's a small thing that says the maintainers thought about different kinds of users.
-
Self-hosted and offline-capable. You own the data, and you're not locked out when the network drops. For a travel app specifically, offline support isn't a nice-to-have — it's the moment you actually need it, standing in a train station with no signal.
-
The AI is optional and clearly marked. The README is refreshingly honest about which features ship off by default, including the AI assistant. You can hand off "the busy work" if you want, or ignore it entirely.
How to Try It
The quickest path is the hosted demo, which lets you poke around before committing to anything:
- Try the demo at demo.liketrek.com.
- For a real deployment, pull the Docker image from Docker Hub (
mauriceboe/trek). - Once it's running, log in as an admin and review the feature toggles — enable only the modules you actually want.
- Clone or star the repo at github.com/liketrek/trek if you want to follow development or contribute.
The project is licensed under AGPL v3, has an active Discord, a public roadmap, and CI and SonarCloud badges on the README, so there's visible infrastructure behind it. If you hit a wall during setup, the Discord is the place to ask.
Final Thoughts
TREK is aimed at people who plan group trips and are comfortable running a Docker container — the self-hosting crowd, homelab folks, and anyone who'd rather not hand their travel data to yet another SaaS product. It's ambitious in scope, which cuts both ways: there's a lot here, and the module system is what keeps that ambition manageable. If you've been looking for a single home for your next trip that you actually control, it's worth spinning up the demo and seeing whether the pieces fit how you travel.