Why We're Building Tiki Tours — Mobile-First, Off-Grid Ready

A short founder note, because every app should explain itself.

The problem we kept hitting#

Every time we planned a trip into the New Zealand backcountry, we ended up juggling six tabs and three apps. DOC for hut bookings and track status. MetService for forecasts. Topo50 PDFs printed at home. A spreadsheet for shuttle logistics. WhatsApp for the group. Notes app for the gear list. Everything connected by copy-paste.

Then we got to the trailhead, lost reception, and most of those tabs became useless.

What Tiki Tours is#

Tiki Tours is a trip-planning and discovery app for off-grid Aotearoa. Mobile-primary, designed to work without signal, with the trail data you actually need on the device before you leave reception.

The pieces, in priority order:

1. DOC trail and hut data, offline. Synced from doc.govt.nz under their CC BY 4.0 licence, so you have it when MetService cuts out at the saddle.
2. Trip planning that survives the carpark. Day-by-day itineraries, hut bookings, transport notes, gear lists — all in one trip object, all available offline.
3. Public sharing for the parts that should be shared. Want to publish a writeup of the Rees-Dart for friends planning the same trip? One link.
4. Map dashboard, not a feed. Open the app, see the map of where you are and where the trails are. Discovery before scrolling.

What it is not#

Just as importantly, Tiki Tours is not:

• An ad-supported app. No banner ads. No sponsored trails. The unit economics of niche outdoor advertising are dismal anyway.
• A social network. We will have a comments and likes layer eventually, but the core experience is not a feed.
• Strava for hiking. We integrate with Strava and Garmin, but optionally and non-invasively. Your fitness data stays yours.
• A guidebook. DOC writes the canonical track descriptions. We display them with attribution.

Why mobile-first#

The web app is excellent for planning at home. The mobile app is the one you carry to the trailhead. We are building both, but the mobile experience is where decisions get made — at the carpark, at the hut, in the rain, in cellphone-shadow. That is the experience we are designing for.

That has consequences:

• The home screen is a full-viewport map, not a list.
• Offline tile packs cover the regions you have planned trips in.
• Touch targets are sized for cold gloves.
• Battery and data use are aggressively minimised.

Why off-grid#

Most NZ backcountry has no signal. None. Cellphone coverage stops at the bushline almost everywhere outside the main highways. An app that requires signal to be useful is, by definition, useless when you are actually using a backcountry.

Off-grid first means:

• Your trips, gear lists, and hut info are local-first. Edits queue and sync when signal returns.
• DOC trail data is on-device for the regions you care about.
• Map tiles can be pre-downloaded as offline packs (a paid Trekker feature, because the storage costs money).

The Trekker tier and the 1% pledge#

Most of Tiki Tours is free, forever. The full track and hut catalog, unlimited trip planning, public sharing — all on the free Explorer tier. We pay for hosting out of subscription revenue from the Trekker tier (NZ$3.99/month or NZ$29/year), which adds:

• Offline tile packs.
• Custom routes (drawing your own, importing GPX).
• Push notifications for trail status and weather.
• Garmin and Strava sync.
• PDF and iCal export.

1% of paid revenue goes to Forest & Bird, every year, in perpetuity. It is on the about page, in the billing email, and in our accounts. We considered higher percentages — 1% is what we can sustain forever without being theatre. We will raise it as the company scales.

Where we are now#

Tiki Tours is in active development. The core trip-planning loop works, the DOC sync runs nightly, the map dashboard is in beta, and we are heading into offline tile packs as our last big MVP feature before public launch.

We are based in Aotearoa. The app is being built by a tiny team — initially just me — who walks these trails. Every feature is shaped by a real trip we have done or are about to do. That is not a marketing claim. It is the reason the project exists.

If you find a bug, hit reply on any email from us. If you have a feature you wish existed, the same. We read every message and most of them shape the roadmap.

What is next#

The next things shipping are:

• Offline tile packs for the South Island (Trekker only, ~250 MB per region).
• Garmin and Strava integration (Trekker only, opt-in).
• Public trip sharing with friendly URLs (free).
• Te Reo, German, French, Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese localisation.

Thanks for reading, and for caring about the same things we care about. The bush is better when more people know how to look after it. We hope Tiki Tours helps a little.

— Jay