Creating a Trip (Expeditions)

🏔️ Creating a Trip (Expeditions)

Overview

In Vanlife Assistant, an Expedition (or “Trip”) is the master container for a specific era of your travels.

If your whole vanlife experience is a book, Expeditions are the chapters. By grouping your Drive Recorder routes, Check-ins, and financial expenses into a specific Trip (e.g., “Winter in Morocco 2026” or “The Pan-American Highway”), you can view beautiful, isolated statistics and maps for just that specific journey.

🛠️ Step-by-Step: Creating a New Expedition

1. Open the Trip Manager From the Trips tab, tap the signpost icon (↕) in the top-right corner of the screen. This opens your Trip Manager—the full list of all your expeditions, organised by Current, Upcoming, and Past.

2. Tap the + button Tap the + button in the top-right corner of the Trip Manager to open the expedition editor.

3. Name your Trip Give it an epic name. “3 Months in Scandinavia”, “The Long Way Round”, “Weekend in the Lakes”—this is what the app will display everywhere, so make it one you’ll enjoy seeing.

4. Set the Dates Choose a Start Date. If this is an open-ended adventure with no fixed return, leave the Has End Datetoggle switched off. If you do have a planned end date, toggle it on and a second date picker will appear. You can always edit this later.

5. Add Expedition Context (Optional, but powerful) This is the secret weapon for upcoming trips. Under the Expedition Context section, you’ll find a scrollable cloud of tags drawn from your Van Manifest. Each tag represents a category of gear in your inventory—things like Climbing, Surfing, Winter, or Remote Work.

Tap any tag to select it (it will highlight in your accent colour). You can select as many as apply to your trip.

When you open this expedition later, the app’s Scout Engine reads your selected contexts and cross-references them against every item in your manifest. It then suggests gear you should load before you leave (items tagged Climbing that are currently stowed away) and gear you might want to unload (a surfboard taking up space on a ski trip). Think of it as the app packing your van for you.

Don’t see the right tags? Type a new one into the “Add New Context…” field and tap the + button. It gets saved to your inventory contexts immediately and is selected for this trip straight away.

6. Add Notes (Optional) The Notes field is a free-text space for planning thoughts, reminders, or rough itineraries. This is for your eyes only and travels with the expedition.

7. Tap Save Your expedition is created and appears in the Trip Manager. If its Start Date is today or in the past, it’s immediately Active and the app begins aggregating data into it. If the Start Date is in the future, it enters Planning Mode—see Trip States - Future, Active, and Past Expeditions for what that means.

✏️ Editing or Deleting a Trip

You can change any detail of a trip at any time.

Swipe right on any trip in the Trip Manager and tap Edit.
Or long-press a trip for a context menu with both Edit Details and Delete Trip options.

⚠️ Deleting a trip is permanent and cannot be undone. It will not delete any associated Check-ins, Drive Logs, or financial transactions—but it will remove the expedition container that groups them together.

How It Works in the Background

Once a Trip is active, Vanlife Assistant goes to work silently:

All new financial expenses are automatically tagged with this Trip’s date range.
Every GPS breadcrumb dropped by the Drive Recorder is woven into this Trip’s map.
Every Check-in and photo you save builds out a chronological journal specific to this Expedition.

You don’t need to do anything—just live your vanlife and the app captures the story for you.