The short version: your trip planning never leaves your browser. There is no account, no server, and no database. We cannot see what you type, because it is never sent to us.
Nothing you enter. Group Trip Cost runs entirely in your browser as a single page. Party names, departure cities, prices, notes and destinations are held in your browser's local storage on your own device and are never transmitted anywhere.
The Save file button writes a file to your computer. Download analysis builds an HTML file and downloads it to your computer. Neither uploads anything. If you send that file to someone, you are the one sending it.
One exception, described in full under Share links below: when you use Copy share link, a short summary — trip name, dates and destinations — does travel in the address so that messaging apps can show a useful preview. Everything else stays on your device.
A share link has two halves, and they are not equally private.
Everything after the # is your whole plan. Browsers never transmit that
part of a URL to a web server, so although the link points at this site, we do not receive your plan and
could not read it if we wanted to. It is decoded in the recipient's browser.
Everything before the # is a short summary, and that part is sent to us.
It contains your trip name, your travel dates, the number of nights, and the names and group totals of
your top three destinations — nothing else. You can read it yourself: it is deliberately plain text in
the link rather than an encoded blob, so nothing about it is hidden from you.
It exists so a link posted in a group chat shows what trip it is instead of a generic card. Messaging apps and search engines build that preview by fetching the address, which means they see the summary too, and it may be retained in server logs.
The trip name is the one field here you write yourself, so it deserves a word. It is used as the headline of the preview, which is the whole point of it — but that means whatever you type there travels. If you would rather it didn't, leave the trip name blank: everything else still works, and the preview falls back to your destinations and dates. Party names, which are far more likely to be real people's names, are never included.
The consequence is worth stating plainly: anyone holding the link can see the plan — party names, departure cities, blackout dates, and every figure you entered. Treat a share link exactly as you would treat the plan itself, and don't post one publicly unless you're content for its contents to be public.
Opening someone else's share link does not overwrite anything you have saved. Nothing is written to your device until you change something, and the page says so while you are viewing a shared plan.
Use Clear everything on this device at the bottom of the page, or clear site data in your browser settings. Because we never received it, there is nothing for us to delete on our end.
This site is intended to be supported by advertising. Ad providers may set cookies or similar identifiers in your browser to measure and target ads. That is the ad network's activity, governed by its own privacy policy.
We will not hand your trip data to an advertiser, and no ad network is sent it. But we want to be
straight about a limit that applies to any site running third-party scripts, including this one:
a script running on a page can read the address of that page, including the part after the
#. So while your plan is never transmitted by us, we cannot promise that a
third-party script could never read a share link you have open. This is a property of how browsers work,
not a choice we made, and it is the honest reason to treat a share link as the plan itself.
If that matters to you, use Save file instead of a share link. A saved file never touches a browser address bar at all.
If you are in the EU, UK, or a region with similar rules, you will be asked for consent before any non-essential cookie is set, and you can decline. If you are in California, you may opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information; we do not sell or share personal information, and we have no personal information about you to sell.
We do not run analytics that profile individuals. If aggregate traffic counts are collected by the host, they are limited to standard web-server information such as page requests and approximate region.
If you use the feedback link, you choose what to send. A short technical context block — how many parties and options you had, your screen size, and your browser version — is included to help reproduce bugs. It contains no destinations, prices, or names. You can delete any part of the message before sending.
Group Trip Cost is a planning tool for adults and is not directed at children. Counting children as travelers in a trip is just a number on your own device; we collect nothing about anyone.
Group Trip Cost is an estimating tool. Figures in the destination library are one person's research on a stated date, and everything else is what you typed. Nothing here is a live fare, a quote, or a booking. Confirm real prices with airlines, hosts and operators before committing money.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.
Questions about privacy, or a request to correct something on this page: feedback@grouptripcost.com, or use the feedback link on the main page.