1. Acceptance of terms
By creating an account and using Pack Hiker, you agree to these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, do not register or use the service.
2. Description of service
Pack Hiker is a collaborative trip-planning platform for groups undertaking multi-day hikes. It provides tools for itinerary and route planning, expense tracking, emergency contact management, and group communication. Pack Hiker is in beta: it is under active development, and its features may change (see "Changes to the service" below).
3. Your account
You must provide accurate and complete information when creating your account. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password and for all activity under your account.
You must be at least 18 years of age to create an account. By registering, you confirm that you meet this requirement.
You must notify us immediately of any unauthorised access to your account.
4. Pack Hiker Pro and the beta
Some features and higher limits are part of Pack Hiker Pro — for example PDF export, your own hike background photos, and more active hikes and larger groups than the free plan allows. During the beta, accounts get Pro free of charge.
When the beta ends, Pro will become a paid plan, and the free plan will have limits — currently one active hike that you own, and four members per hike, Pack Shadows included. We will give you notice before the beta ends.
We will never charge you anything unless you choose to sign up for a paid plan. A paid plan will come with its own terms — its price, how it renews and how to cancel — which you will see before you pay, and nothing in them will limit your rights under the Australian Consumer Law.
If your account moves to the free plan, nothing you have already created is deleted. The free plan's limits apply only to creating new hikes and adding new members.
5. Acceptable use
You agree not to use Pack Hiker to:
Upload, post, or transmit any content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable
Impersonate any person or entity
Register an account with an email address that is not yours
Send email — by inviting someone to a hike, listing them as an emergency contact, or sending a safety brief — to people who have not agreed to hear from you, or use those features to harass anyone
Upload malicious files or code
Attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the service or other users' accounts
Scrape, crawl or otherwise collect data from the service or its public pages by automated means, other than through the features the service provides
Use content from the service, other than your own, to train machine-learning or artificial-intelligence systems
Reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the service, except to the extent the law allows
Interfere with, overload or disrupt the service, or try to get around its security measures, rate limits or plan limits
Use the service for any commercial purpose without our express written consent
Violate any applicable laws or regulations
6. Your content
You keep ownership of the content you add to Pack Hiker — route files you upload, routes you draw, photos, itinerary entries, notes and messages. You give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, copy, display, reformat and transmit that content as needed to run the service, including to:
show it to the members of your hikes, and let them download the route files you add;
include it in the PDF exports, safety briefs and check-in alerts that members create or have us send, which go to members and to their emergency contacts; and
publish what you write into a hike's shared plan — itinerary entries, notes, place names and links, routes and camps — on a public share page, if the hike's owner publishes one (see "Publishing a hike plan publicly" below). The owner is shown every entry before publishing and can hide any of it.
What you contribute to a hike's shared records — itinerary entries, routes and route files, expenses and messages — stays with that hike when you leave it or delete your account, so the rest of the group keeps a complete plan and accurate accounts. After you delete your account it is shown without your name. The licence continues for as long as that content remains in the hike.
Hikes are collaborative: members with edit rights can change or delete what you add. To the extent you have moral rights in your contributions, you consent to other members editing, adapting or removing them, to their being published as described above, and to their being shown without your name once you have deleted your account.
You are responsible for ensuring that content you add does not infringe third-party rights and complies with applicable laws. Many route files — from guidebooks, commercial apps and clubs — are licensed for personal use only; do not add or share one you do not have the right to share.
7. Sharing of personal information
By joining a hike, you acknowledge and consent that everything you add to it — including your name, email address, phone number (if provided), and any emergency contacts, PLBs and emergency notes — will be visible to all other members of that hike, apart from private expenses. Your emergency details are also included in the safety briefs and check-in alerts that other members send to their own emergency contacts. See ourPrivacy Policyfor full details.
8. Group hikes and shared expenses
Each hike is run by its owner, who can appoint co-admins. The owner and co-admins decide who is in the hike and what each member can do: they can invite and remove members, change members' permissions, and edit or delete the hike's shared content. Only the owner can close or delete a hike, and deleting it removes its content for every member.
If the owner leaves the hike or deletes their account, ownership passes to the longest-standing co-admin or, if there is none, to the longest-standing member. When you leave a hike or are removed from it, your food plan, gear packing status, private expenses, and emergency contacts and PLBs for that hike are deleted; what you contributed to the hike's shared records stays with the group.
Expenses: Pack Hiker is a record-keeping and calculation tool. It does not process payments, hold money or transfer funds, and it does not verify what members enter. The balances and suggested settle-up payments it shows are calculated only from the expenses and reimbursements members record, so they are only as accurate as those entries. Settling up — and any disagreement about what is owed — is between the members concerned. Nothing Pack Hiker shows is financial, tax or accounting advice.
Other members: We do not control what other members add or how they behave, and we are not a party to arrangements between members. You can tell us about a member who is breaking these terms and we may act on it, but we are not obliged to resolve disputes between members.
9. Publishing a hike plan publicly
A hike owner may publish an unlisted public link to a simplified, read-only copy of their hike plan. We do not list, promote or link to it anywhere, and we take measures to keep it out of search engines — but those measures are instructions that search engines generally honour, not a guarantee, and we cannot ensure a shared page never appears in search results. The link is public to anyone who has it, it can be forwarded, and content that has already been read cannot be recalled. Every link expires on a date the owner chooses, and the owner can revoke or regenerate it at any time.
The published copy deliberately excludes dates, members, expenses, food plans, gear, chat, backpack weights and all emergency information. It does include the free text the hike's planners wrote — descriptions, notes, links and place names — which the owner is shown in full, entry by entry, and can switch off individually before publishing. By publishing, you warrant that you have the right to make that content public.
Pack Hiker transmits a shared plan on the owner's behalf. We do not review, verify, curate or endorse shared plans, and a shared plan is not a recommendation by us that a route is safe, legal or passable — see the safety disclaimer below, which applies to shared plans in full. Conditions, access, water and campsites change, and you are responsible for your own planning, navigation, permits and safety. We may disable a public link that is used to abuse the service or to publish unlawful content.
10. Reporting content
If you believe something on Pack Hiker — including a public share page — infringes your copyright or other rights, or is unlawful or abusive, tell us at privacy@packhiker.com. Every public share page has a Report link that starts the email for you. Please include:
the address of the page, or where in Pack Hiker the content appears;
what the content is, and why you believe it infringes your rights or is unlawful;
your name and how to contact you; and
for a copyright complaint, a statement that you own the rights concerned or are authorised to act for their owner, and that the information in your report is accurate.
We may remove or disable access to content, or disable a public link, while we look into a report, and we may tell the member responsible that a report was made. We may suspend or close the account of a member who repeatedly infringes other people's rights. If content of yours was removed and you believe that was a mistake, contact us and we will review it.
11. Safety disclaimer — planning tool only, not for navigation
Pack Hiker is a trip-planning and coordination tool only. It is NOT a navigation device or navigation aid and must never be relied upon to navigate, find your position, or find your way in the field.
The maps, routes, elevation profiles, waypoints, and any location information shown in Pack Hiker are provided for planning purposes only. They may be inaccurate, incomplete, out of date, or unavailable — for example if your device is offline, has no signal, or has a flat battery, which is common in the backcountry. Map imagery and data are supplied by third parties and are not verified by us. Do not use Pack Hiker, a phone, or any single electronic device as your only means of navigation.
Routes drawn with the route planner: The route planner draws routes automatically, using BRouter, an open-source routing engine, and map data from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors). That data is contributed by volunteers and can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and the routing engine can choose badly. A generated route may follow a path that does not exist on the ground, or one that is overgrown, washed out, closed, seasonal, on private land or unsafe, and its distance, elevation and grade figures are estimates. We give no assurance that a generated route is accurate, passable, legal or safe. Check every route — however it was made — against current official maps and the land manager's information before you rely on it.
Estimated elevation: Where a route has no elevation data of its own (a file that arrives without any, a leg drawn with the route planner, or a route you ask to have it added to) Pack Hiker estimates its elevation from elevation models: in New Zealand, LINZ's airborne LiDAR survey of the ground; in the parts of Australia it covers, Geoscience Australia's; and elsewhere, or where those have gaps, the Copernicus digital elevation model, a satellite survey of the elevation of the Earth's surface. Copernicus measures the top of whatever covers the ground, treetops included, and every model has errors, so estimated elevation, and the climb, descent and grade figures worked out from it, can be wrong, especially under forest. New Zealand elevation is adapted from the New Zealand LiDAR 1m DEM, sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed by Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Australian elevation is adapted from the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of Australia derived from LiDAR 5 Metre Grid, © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2015, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Elevation produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 and Copernicus WorldDEM-90 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved. The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30 and Copernicus WorldDEM-90.
Access, permits and closures: Nothing in Pack Hiker — a route, camp, waypoint or water point, whether you added it, the route planner generated it, or someone else shared it — means you may go there. Pack Hiker does not know whether land is private, closed or needs a permit. You are responsible for getting permission to cross private land, for any permits and bookings you need, and for checking closures, fire bans, park alerts and conditions before and during your trip.
Planning figures are not medical advice: Water, food and backpack-weight figures in Pack Hiker — including water advisories set by your hike's planners — are planning estimates, not medical, nutritional or fitness advice. What you need depends on heat, exertion, altitude, your health and the conditions on the day.
When hiking, always use proper navigation tools and skills: a dedicated GPS or navigation app designed for offline field use, together with a physical topographic map and compass and the ability to use them. Pack Hiker does not replace professional safety planning, qualified outdoor leadership, appropriate training and equipment, or the emergency services. Route information, itineraries, and emergency contact details in Pack Hiker are user-generated and have not been verified by us. Always carry appropriate navigation and emergency equipment, check current conditions, and register your trip with the relevant authorities where required.
Hiking and backcountry travel carry inherent risks, including getting lost, injury, illness, exposure and death. You take part in any activity you plan with Pack Hiker at your own risk, and you are solely responsible for your own safety and navigation. We are not responsible for decisions made using information in Pack Hiker, or for any outcomes of outdoor activities planned or undertaken using the service.
12. Post-hike check-in and alerting service
Pack Hiker offers an optional post-hike check-in feature. If you enable it and do not mark yourself as safely returned by the deadline you set, Pack Hiker will attempt to send an automated alert email to the emergency contacts you have nominated. This is a convenience feature to help you keep the people you choose informed — it is not a monitoring, rescue, or emergency-response service.
We do not guarantee that any check-in reminder or alert will be sent, delivered, or received, and no person at Pack Hiker monitors your hike or your check-in status.
While we take reasonable steps to keep the service working, alerts depend on systems outside our control — including email delivery, third-party mail providers, spam filtering, and network and power availability — and may be delayed, filtered, or fail entirely. Nobody at Pack Hiker watches for missed check-ins, verifies your safety, or is responsible for contacting your emergency contacts, the emergency services, search and rescue, or any authority on your behalf, and we are under no obligation to do so. The accuracy of any alert also depends entirely on the deadline, contact details, and other information you provide, and on you remembering to check in when you return.
You must not rely on the check-in feature as your primary or sole safety measure. It does not replace a proper trip plan, leaving your intentions with a trusted person, carrying a personal locator beacon (PLB) or satellite communicator, and registering your trip with the relevant authorities where required. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we accept no liability for any alert that is delayed, not sent, not delivered, or not acted upon, or for any reliance placed on this feature.
13. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by Australian law, Pack Hiker is provided "as is" without warranties of any kind. We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of the service, including but not limited to loss of data, loss of income, or personal injury.
Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any liability that cannot be excluded under Australian Consumer Law.
14. Changes to the service
Pack Hiker is under active development. We may add, change or remove features at any time, including which features are part of Pro. The service may sometimes be unavailable — for maintenance, or because something has gone wrong — and we do not promise that it will always be available or free of errors.
If we decide to close Pack Hiker, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email, and during that time you can ask us for a copy of your data. We recommend keeping your own copies of anything important: route files can be downloaded from each hike, and a hike can be exported as a PDF (a Pro feature).
15. Account deletion and termination
You may delete your account at any time through your Profile settings. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms of Service. See ourPrivacy Policyfor information about what happens to your data when an account is deleted.
16. Changes to terms
We may update these Terms of Service. Material changes will be notified by email and/or a prominent in-app notice. Continued use of Pack Hiker after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.
17. Governing law and general terms
Governing law: These Terms of Service are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia. You and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Queensland and the courts that can hear appeals from them.
Transferring these terms: We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to anyone who takes over running Pack Hiker — for example a company formed to run it — as long as they agree to be bound by these terms and our Privacy Policy. We will tell you before that happens, and you can delete your account if you do not want to continue. You may not transfer your account, or your rights under these terms, to anyone else.
Severability: If any part of these terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, it is to be read down to the extent needed to make it valid or, if that is not possible, severed, and the rest of these terms continue to apply.
18. Contact
Questions about these terms: privacy@packhiker.com