Frequently Asked Questions
Technical & Setup FAQs▼
How does the app track my journey automatically?▼
When you log a travel segment, our transit discovery engine attempts a high-fidelity "Zero AI" lookup against official public transport databases, such as Great Britain’s Realtime Trains API or the Austrian Data Business Platform. If official timetables are missing, the system uses an intelligent search assistant to find the closest matches. Once a journey is logged, the app works in the background to automatically map out high-fidelity geometric track lines across your map interface.
Can I log entries or check data when I am offline?▼
Yes. The app is built as a Progressive Web App (PWA) with built-in offline synchronisation. If you lose your mobile signal while travelling through remote areas or tunnels, you can still view your cached itinerary, teams, and logs. You can also queue new expenses or checkpoint times; the app will safely hold them on your device and upload them automatically the moment your network connection is restored.
⚠️ WARNING: Bypassed Offline Features
Certain features require an active connection and cannot be queued offline. These include uploading raw media files (photos or receipts), running live exchange rate calculations, and executing AI timetable lookups.
Why is the team dropdown menu disabled when I try to submit data?▼
To protect competitive integrity under our strict privacy protocols, participants and trip organisers are automatically locked to their assigned team when logging expenses, checkpoints, journeys, or photos. This completely rules out accidental data entry or tampering on a rival team’s logs.
Why can't I see the active photos or expenses of rival teams?▼
The race operates under a competitive "Fog of War" privacy policy. To keep strategies fair, a specific itinerary leg remains strictly hidden from rival teams until an unmasking threshold is crossed. All data for a leg is automatically revealed only when every active participatory team has safely logged their arrival checkpoint at the end of that stage, or when the overall trip is marked complete by the organisers.
Financial & Expense FAQs▼
How are different currencies handled on international legs?▼
All spending is normalised automatically using a self-healing exchange rate registry. When you enter an expense in a local currency (e.g. Hungarian Forint), the app pulls the official historical exchange rate from the Frankfurter API matching the exact date on your receipt. It then converts and locks a fixed value in your trip's base currency (e.g. Euros) at the point of submission. This ensures your team's budget score is never impacted by future exchange rate fluctuations.
How does the automated receipt scanner work?▼
When you upload a receipt photo or PDF, the app triggers a two-stage digital pipeline. First, it runs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) via the Google Cloud Vision API to extract raw text lines. Then, it passes the text to our Gemini AI engine, which intelligently filters out the receipt date, total amount, currency, and description, and maps it to a fixed category (Accommodation, Travel, or Food).
Licensing & Subscription FAQs▼
What is the difference between a Free Trip and a Premium Trip?▼
Every newly created trip starts on our standard Free Tier. Free trips are subject to strict platform usage quotas to ensure infrastructure sustainability. If a trip remains on the Free Tier, the entire event is collectively limited to a maximum of 10 photo challenge uploads, 10 expense logs, and 10 shared documents across all participating teams combined. Upgrading a trip to Premium entirely removes these upload limits, granting unlimited submissions for the duration of the event.
How do I upgrade my trip to a Premium license?▼
Upgrades are managed seamlessly via a secure Stripe integration linked directly to user profiles. You can access a tailored pricing table to select between a one-off single trip license or a recurring annual subscription. If any active participant listed on an event (either a Trip Organiser or a Team Member) holds an active premium user subscription, the associated trip document is automatically granted an immediate, rolling upgrade to Premium status.
What happens to our data if our Premium license or subscription expires?▼
Your recorded data remains safe. If a subscription expires or is cancelled via the Stripe Customer Portal, the associated trip reverts to standard Free Tier parameters. While you will retain full visibility of all existing submissions and scores on your dashboards, teams will be blocked from uploading new items if the cumulative counters have already crossed the Free Tier quota threshold. You can restore full write access at any time by renewing a subscription or purchasing a one-off license.
If a team member leaves or our trip is deleted, does it affect my subscription?▼
No. User subscriptions are scoped to individual accounts, whereas licenses are scoped to the trip itself. If an organiser deletes a trip, an atomic database cleanup purges all legs, teams, and data associated with that specific event, but it has no impact on your personal account billing. You can seamlessly use your active subscription to unlock premium parameters on any other current or future trip where you are a participant.