How to Digitize a City Food Trail or Tapa Crawl (2026)

To digitize a city food trail, you replace paper stamp cards and PDF ballots with a mobile platform where visitors scan a QR code at each venue, prove they actually tried the dish, collect stamps toward a reward, and vote in real time — while your office watches a live dashboard instead of waiting for a spreadsheet that arrives after the event ends. The fastest, lowest-risk path is a single-trail pilot that goes from a signed agreement to public launch in about 10 days, then scaling to a full program once the numbers prove it out.

This is the definitive guide for the people who actually run these events: city special-events and tourism managers, Business Improvement District (BID) directors, Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) staff, Main Street program coordinators, chamber of commerce teams, and independent festival organizers. It covers what a digital food trail is, why cities are moving off paper, the components that make one work, a step-by-step launch playbook with timeline and stakeholders, honest budget ranges in USD, how to measure success, and the pitfalls that sink first-year programs. We build this kind of platform — TapaPass — so we will name where it fits, but the playbook holds whatever tool you choose.

The short version before the detail: a food trail does not change when you digitize it. The venues, the dates, the award categories, and the marketing are the same things your office already manages. What changes is the passport and the scorekeeping. A paper stamp card becomes a one-tap web passport; a hand-counted ballot becomes a verified, location-locked check-in; a post-event PDF becomes a live dashboard you can steer the event with. Everything downstream of that — credibility, data, reusability — follows from those three swaps.

What is a digital food trail?

A digital food trail is a self-guided culinary route where visitors use a phone instead of a paper stamp card to check in at participating venues, prove they tried the dish, earn rewards, and vote. The format goes by many names — tasting passport, restaurant week, tapa crawl, dish-hop, food crawl, culinary trail, sip-and-stroll — and the underlying mechanic is identical across all of them. A defined set of venues each serves a featured item. Visitors travel between them in any order, collecting proof of each stop, and the organizer tracks participation and results.

The "digital" part is narrower than the marketing usually implies. You are not building an app that reinvents your event. You are replacing two specific paper artifacts. The first is the passport itself: the physical card that diners carry from venue to venue to collect stamps. In a digital trail that becomes a web page that lives on the visitor's phone, updated automatically each time they check in. The second is the ballot and the tally: the slip of paper or the Google Form where people vote for their favorite, and the manual count that follows. In a digital trail the vote is a tap inside the passport, recorded the instant it happens, and the running total is visible to the organizer in real time.

Everything else that makes a food trail good — well-chosen venues, a clear price point, a tight voting window, marketing that drives people out the door — stays exactly where it was. That is the most important framing for a decision-maker to internalize, because vendors who position a food trail platform as a transformation of your event are overselling. It is a better passport and a better scoreboard. That is enough to change the economics, the credibility, and the data, but it is not a reinvention of how you run special events.

A digital trail is distinct from a generic loyalty app or a plain QR check-in tool. Those handle points and scans but were not designed for the governance a public food event requires: a vote that can survive a disputed award, district-level reporting an economic-development office can use, city branding rather than a vendor logo, and a clean data export for a grant file. A purpose-built food trail platform bundles the route mechanics, the integrity layer, and the organizer reporting into one system that a public body can actually defend.

Why digitize: paper food trails leak value in three places

Paper food trails quietly cost you in three ways at once — unverifiable voting, results that arrive too late to act on, and a near-total loss of reusable data — and a digital platform fixes all three without asking visitors to download anything. Each deserves its own look, because each maps to a real conversation you will have with a council member, a BID board, or a participating restaurant.

The voting is unverifiable

A printed ballot or an open Google Form can be filled out by anyone with a pen or a browser tab, whether or not they ever set foot in the venue or tasted the dish. That means the "winning" dish is often simply the one whose owner mobilized the most friends, staff, and family to vote. Every organizer who has run a popular-vote award knows the awkward feeling of announcing a winner they are not fully sure earned it.

This is not a minor integrity quibble. It is the single thing that most erodes the credibility of a city award over time. Restaurants notice when the same venue wins because it ran a phone tree, and the good operators — the ones whose food would actually win on merit — start to disengage. A verified check-in, where the vote is locked to a physical QR code at the venue and ideally backed by a photo of the dish, is what restores the legitimacy of the competition. It is also, in our experience, the feature participating restaurants care about most, because it protects the contest they agreed to enter.

The data arrives too late to matter

The classic paper pattern is a results PDF that lands on your desk after the event is already over. By then every operational lever is gone. You cannot reroute marketing budget toward a district that is underperforming. You cannot tell a struggling venue to push harder on social while it still counts. You cannot answer a council member or a board chair who asks "how is it going?" mid-event with anything but a guess. The event runs as a black box, and you only see inside it once it is too late to change anything.

A live dashboard turns the same event into something you actively steer. When you can see, on Saturday afternoon, that the east side is quiet and downtown is packed, you can push a geo-targeted post, redeploy a street team, or extend a venue's featured slot — that day, not three weeks later. The difference between managing an event and merely hosting one is whether you can see what is happening while it happens.

You learn almost nothing reusable

Paper gives you a winner and very little else. No count of how many distinct visitors actually walked the trail. No heat map of which neighborhoods drew crowds and which were skipped. No participation curve showing whether the second weekend outperformed the first. No clean dataset to hand to economic development for next year's planning, or to attach to a grant report that justified the program in the first place.

For a public organization, this is the most expensive leak of the three, because the data is what makes the program defensible and fundable in future budget cycles. "The event was popular" is a weak argument in a budget meeting. "The trail logged 1,800 verified check-ins across 16 venues, drew measurable foot traffic into three under-visited districts, and produced this exportable dataset" is a strong one. Digitizing is, in large part, about generating the evidence that keeps the program alive year over year.

Here is the side-by-side that summarizes the shift:

The components of a digital food trail platform

A digital food trail platform is built from five components that work together: a mobile QR passport, a venue onboarding flow, a verified check-in and voting engine, a rewards and loyalty layer, and an organizer dashboard. Understanding each in isolation tells you what to look for when you evaluate any vendor, and what questions to ask before you sign.

The mobile QR passport

The passport is what the visitor holds. The decisive design choice here is delivery: a PWA (progressive web app) versus a native app store download. A PWA installs in one tap directly from the browser — no App Store, no Google Play, no account-creation wall, no large download. A visitor scans a QR code on a venue table tent and is participating within seconds. A native app, by contrast, asks a casual diner to leave what they are doing, find your app in a store, wait for an 80-megabyte download, and create an account before they can collect a single stamp. The drop-off at that step is brutal, and for a one-weekend event it is fatal. For public food trails in 2026, the PWA approach is the right default for exactly this reason. We cover the passport mechanics, the QR flow, and the dashboard in depth in our piece on how the QR passport and dashboard work together.

The passport should show the visitor their progress — stamps collected, venues remaining, rewards within reach — and carry your city's branding, not the vendor's. Visitors should experience an official municipal or district program, not an ad for a software company.

Venue onboarding

The venues are your hardest logistical lift, not the technology, and a good platform makes their part trivial. Each participating restaurant needs a record in the system (name, location, the featured dish, hours), a physical QR code to place at the point of service, and — if the platform supports it — a simple way to see their own check-in count. The onboarding flow matters because your venues are busy small-business operators who will not tolerate a complicated setup. The realistic test: can a restaurant owner be live on the trail in a few minutes with a printed code and a one-page instruction sheet? If onboarding requires each venue to install software or manage a complex dashboard, adoption will stall and you will spend the event chasing stragglers.

Verified check-ins and voting

This is the integrity engine, and it is the component that most distinguishes a serious food trail platform from a generic QR tool. The mechanism: the visitor scans a physical QR code that exists only at the venue, and on the stronger platforms uploads a photo of the dish, which is validated before the check-in and any associated vote are accepted. Because the QR code is physical and location-bound, a check-in is proof of presence. Because the photo is validated, a vote is proof of having actually received the dish. The combination is what makes the eventual award defensible. We go deeper on the integrity model — and how to defend a winner — in our breakdown of verified voting on a food trail.

When you evaluate platforms, press on the failure modes. What stops one person from scanning the same code repeatedly? What happens to a check-in with a bad or missing photo? Can the organizer see and, if necessary, void suspicious activity? These are the questions a vendor with a real integrity layer answers easily and a vendor selling a thin QR wrapper deflects.

Rewards and loyalty

The reward is the engine that pulls visitors from the first venue to the last. The mechanic is familiar from physical stamp cards: collect a defined number of stamps and unlock something — entry into a prize drawing, a discount, a piece of merchandise, recognition as a completer. Digitizing it adds two things paper cannot. First, the reward state is tracked automatically and accurately; nobody is hand-verifying a smudged card. Second, the passport can persist beyond a single event. A platform where stamps accumulate over time turns a one-weekend trail into an ongoing relationship — a visitor who collected three stamps this spring still has a reason to come back in the fall, and a reason to walk a different trail in a neighboring district. For a DMO or a BID thinking past a single event, that persistence is where the long-term value compounds.

The organizer dashboard

The dashboard is what you, the buyer, will actually live in. It should give you, in real time: total participants and distinct check-ins, live dish or venue rankings, redemption counts against your reward, and a geographic heat map of where the activity is concentrated. The standard to hold it to is operational, not decorative. The question is not "does it have charts" but "can I make a decision on Saturday afternoon with what this screen shows me." A dashboard that loads yesterday's data is a report, not an operations tool. A dashboard that shows you the quiet district while you can still do something about it is the reason to digitize in the first place.

Benefits by organizer type: city vs BID vs DMO vs association vs festival

The benefits of digitizing differ by who is running the trail, because each organizer type answers to different stakeholders and measures success differently. A platform that serves all of them shares the same mechanics, but the case you make internally — and the metrics you watch — should be tailored to your role.

City special-events and tourism offices are accountable to elected officials and residents. Their strongest case is defensibility: verified results they can announce without an asterisk, live data to manage the event responsibly with public money, and a clean dataset that justifies the budget line next year. A city's worst outcome is a contested award or a council member asking for results that do not exist. Digitizing removes both risks.

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and Main Street programs exist to drive economic activity into a defined geographic footprint. Their headline metric is foot traffic into the district's businesses, and the heat map is their core deliverable — proof that the assessment dollars businesses pay produced measurable visits to those businesses. A BID can take a verified check-in count to its board and its members as direct evidence of value delivered, which is far stronger than "the event felt busy."

Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and convention and visitors bureaus care about visitation, length of stay, and a story they can tell stakeholders and grant funders. A persistent passport that spans multiple trails and seasons supports the visitation narrative, and exportable data supports the reporting DMOs are constantly asked to produce. For a DMO, the trail is also a content and reactivation channel: the people who walked it are a known, re-engageable audience.

Chambers of commerce and merchant associations are membership organizations whose value to members is engagement and visibility. A digital trail gives every participating member a fair, verifiable shot at recognition and a count of the diners it drew — a tangible member benefit that is easy to renew around. The verified-voting integrity matters acutely here, because the membership relationship is damaged when an award looks rigged.

Independent festival and restaurant-week organizers run on tight margins and reputation. For them the platform is operational leverage: it replaces volunteer ballot-counting, eliminates disputes, and produces sponsor-ready engagement numbers. A festival organizer can hand a sponsor a verified participation report instead of an estimate, which directly affects what sponsors are willing to pay next year.

The unifying point: the mechanic is the same, but the dashboard metric you build your internal narrative around should match what your stakeholders actually fund. Decide that before launch, not after.

The launch playbook: a step-by-step rollout

You do not need a year of procurement to test a digital food trail. A focused pilot on a single, contained trail proves the model, and the build window from a signed agreement is short. Here is the sequence that works, with the decisions and stakeholders at each step.

Step 1 — Pick one trail to pilot

Choose a contained, recurring event with a clear set of venues: an existing tasting passport, a restaurant week, or a single-neighborhood food trail. A bounded pilot keeps the learning fast and the risk low. Ten to twenty venues is an ideal size — large enough to produce a real heat map and a defensible winner, small enough to launch and troubleshoot quickly. Resist the urge to digitize the entire city's dining scene in season one; the organizers who succeed start narrow and expand. If you want the budget shape before you commit, our companion article breaks down what a food trail platform costs for a first-year pilot.

Step 2 — Define the trail and the rules

Confirm the participating venues, the featured dish or tapa each will serve, the price point (a fixed, low per-stop price — a tapa and a drink, for example — drives participation and keeps the value clear), the voting window, and the award categories. This is the same planning you already do on paper. You are simply feeding it into a structured system. Lock these before the build, because changing rules mid-event is where credibility problems start.

Step 3 — Brand it as your city's

The platform should carry your city's, district's, or organization's identity, not a vendor's. Visitors must experience an official program. Provide your logo, colors, and the event name; confirm the vendor can present the passport and dashboard under your brand. This is also where you align internal stakeholders — the communications office, the relevant business district, any sponsors — on how the program is presented publicly.

Step 4 — Recruit and onboard venues

The longest pole in a first-time program is venue recruitment, not technology. For an event you already run, the venues are committed and this step is short. For a new trail, budget real lead time to sign venues, collect their featured dish and hours, and brief them on the QR mechanic. Make their ask small: a printed code at the point of service and a one-page explanation. The faster a venue can be live, the smoother your launch.

Step 5 — Print and place the QR codes

Each venue gets a physical QR code at the point of service. This is the anchor of the entire verified-voting system, so placement is not an afterthought — it belongs somewhere the diner naturally sees it when the dish arrives. A code hidden behind the register or printed too small to scan in dim restaurant lighting will quietly kill participation at that venue. Print durable materials (table tents, window clings, or counter cards) and confirm each scans cleanly on a phone before the event.

Step 6 — Run an internal pilot before going public

Before the public launch, walk the trail yourself. Have staff scan codes, upload photos, trigger votes, and watch the data land on the dashboard at each venue. Confirm the check-ins register, the photo validation behaves, the rankings update, and the heat map populates correctly. Catching a misprinted code or a misconfigured venue here costs nothing; catching it when residents are standing in a restaurant with a code that will not scan costs you credibility on launch day.

Step 7 — Go live and steer with the dashboard

Launch publicly and treat the dashboard as a control panel, not a trophy case. Watch participation by district, push marketing toward quiet areas in real time, and keep an eye on the integrity signals. The whole reason to digitize is to manage the event while it runs — use it.

Step 8 — Close out, export, and report

When the voting window closes, you have an immediate, verified result — no overnight tally. Export the full dataset, announce the winner with confidence, and build your stakeholder report from real numbers: distinct participants, check-ins per venue, district heat map, redemption counts. This report is the asset that funds next year's program, so treat the export and the write-up as part of the event, not an optional extra.

The realistic timeline

For a single-trail pilot where venues and rules are already decided, the build runs on a roughly 10-day timeline from a signed agreement: kick-off on day 1, city branding by day 3, QR codes printed by day 5, an internal test run on day 7, and the public launch on day 10. With TapaPass that is the standard cadence. The caveat worth stating plainly: 10 days is the platform build, not the venue recruitment. A first-time program still recruiting restaurants should add several weeks of lead time before that window starts. The technology is fast; the relationships take as long as they take.

Stakeholders and governance: who needs to be at the table

A digital food trail touches more people than the special-events coordinator who runs it, and identifying the stakeholders early prevents the late-stage surprises that delay launches. The governance question every public buyer eventually faces — who owns the data, who can the city defend the program to — is easier to answer when the right people were involved from the start.

The internal owner is whoever runs the event today: the special-events team, the BID program manager, the DMO's events lead. They own the venue relationships, the rules, and the dashboard. The communications or marketing office owns how the program is presented publicly and the campaigns that drive people to the trail; they need the city branding and the social assets early. IT or data governance, in a municipal context, will ask about hosting, data ownership, privacy compliance, and security — questions you should pre-answer rather than discover during procurement. Finance or procurement owns the contract and will want a defined deliverable and clear data-ownership terms. Participating venues are external stakeholders whose buy-in determines whether the trail has content at all; the verified-voting integrity is your strongest pitch to the good operators among them. And elected officials or a board are the ultimate audience for the results, which is why defensible, exportable data is not a nice-to-have but the deliverable.

Getting these parties aligned before the build is the difference between a 10-day launch and a program that stalls in legal review. The two questions that recur in every municipal conversation are data ownership and privacy, and both should have clean, written answers before you sign — covered in the data section below.

Budget: orientative USD ranges for digitizing a food trail

Pricing for a digital food trail is quote-based and scaled to the event, but the ranges are predictable enough to budget against. These are orientative figures for the US market in 2026, not guarantees, and the actual number depends on venue count, branding needs, support level, and whether you are running one pilot or a year-round program.

The biggest cost drivers are the number of venues (each adds onboarding and a physical code), the depth of custom branding, and the level of hands-on support you want during the event. A pilot run by an experienced internal team needs less support than a first-time program that wants the vendor on call through launch weekend.

What the price should always include, and what to confirm in writing: platform setup and configuration, your branding, the printed QR materials, an internal test run, dashboard access for the live window, and a full data export. If a quote is dramatically below the pilot range, ask what is missing — typically it is the integrity layer, the branding, or the support, which are exactly the things that separate a credible city program from a generic QR app pointed at your restaurants. The full cost mechanics, including what drives a pilot up or down, are in our dedicated food trail platform cost and pilot breakdown.

A note on procurement framing for public buyers: in many US jurisdictions a single-trail pilot in the lower end of this range can be handled as a small-dollar or contract-minor purchase rather than a full competitive procurement, which is part of why piloting small is also procurementally simpler. Confirm your own thresholds, but the pilot path is usually the faster one to get authorized.

Data ownership, privacy, and avoiding lock-in

You own the data, you can export it at any time, and a properly structured platform leaves you with a full export even if you walk away — these are the answers a public buyer needs, and they should be in the contract, not just the sales pitch. Two questions come up in every municipal conversation, and both have clean answers when the platform is built right.

Who owns the data? The city or organizer does. You should be able to export a full CSV at any point during the program, and receive a complete CSV/JSON export if you choose not to renew. There must be no hostage situation where your residents' engagement history is trapped in a vendor's database and held against your renewal. Make data ownership and export rights an explicit contract term.

Is it privacy-compliant? Confirm the platform's posture in writing: GDPR-grade data handling, a data processing agreement available, no tracking cookies, and clarity on where the data is hosted. TapaPass, for instance, self-hosts on EU infrastructure to a GDPR-grade standard with a DPA available and no tracking cookies — the kind of posture that survives a public-records or resident-privacy question. For any public body that has to answer to residents about how their data is handled, that posture is a feature, not an afterthought.

Lock-in is the third risk, and it is the one buyers under-weight at signing. A platform that owns your branding, your data, and your venue relationships, with no export path, has you cornered at renewal. The defenses are simple to ask for: full data export rights, city branding rather than vendor branding, and a clear understanding of what you keep if you leave. Ask these before you sign, when you have leverage, not at renewal, when you do not.

How to measure success: the metrics that matter

Measure a digital food trail on participation, verified engagement, geographic reach, and reusable outcome data — not on whether the event "felt busy." Decide the metrics before launch, capture the baseline, and build your stakeholder report around the numbers your funders actually care about.

The core operational metrics, all of which the dashboard should produce in real time:

• Distinct participants — how many unique people actually walked the trail, not raw scans. This is your headline reach number and the honest answer to "how many people came."
• Verified check-ins per venue — the foot-traffic count each restaurant can see, and the BID's core deliverable. This is the number a venue renews around.
• Completion rate — how many participants collected enough stamps to earn the reward. A low completion rate tells you the trail is too long, too spread out, or the reward is too weak.
• Geographic distribution — the heat map. Which districts drew crowds, which were skipped. This is the economic-development story and the input to next year's venue mix.
• Vote integrity signals — the share of votes backed by valid verified check-ins. This is what lets you defend the winner if anyone challenges it.
• Redemption counts — how many rewards were actually claimed, which connects engagement to a tangible outcome.

The discipline that separates a fundable program from an abandoned one is setting the baseline and target before launch. If last year's paper event drew an estimated crowd, write down the estimate; this year's verified count either confirms or corrects it, and either way you now have a real number to grow from. Agree with your stakeholders, in advance, on what success looks like — "X verified participants and a heat map showing activity in the target districts" — so the post-event report answers a question someone asked rather than reporting numbers nobody agreed mattered.

The most common measurement failure is declaring success on launch night because the streets were full, then having no data three months later when the budget conversation happens. The dashboard makes the right metrics free to capture. The only requirement is deciding which ones matter before you turn it on.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Most first-year digital food trails that disappoint fail for predictable, preventable reasons — and almost none of them are technology failures. Knowing the failure modes in advance is cheaper than discovering them in front of residents on launch day.

Requiring an app store download. This is the adoption killer. A casual diner will not leave a restaurant, find your app, wait for a download, and create an account to collect one stamp. If a vendor's solution is a native app store download, weigh that drop-off seriously; the PWA approach exists precisely to avoid it.

Skipping the internal test run. The temptation under deadline is to print the codes and go live. Then a code does not scan in dim lighting, a venue was configured with the wrong dish, and the failures happen in public. The internal pilot in step 6 is non-negotiable for exactly this reason.

Treating venue recruitment as fast. The technology launches in days; the relationships do not. First-time programs that assume venues will sign instantly end up launching with too few participants and a thin trail. Recruit early and confirm commitments in writing.

Bad QR placement. A code hidden behind the register, printed too small, or placed where the diner never looks will silently suppress check-ins at that venue and skew your results. Placement is part of the integrity of the whole system.

Choosing a generic QR tool over a purpose-built platform. A plain loyalty or check-in app handles scans but lacks the verified-voting integrity, the district heat maps, the city branding, and the clean export a public program needs. You discover the gap when an award is disputed or when finance asks for data the tool cannot produce.

No plan for the data. Capturing the data is automatic; using it is not. Programs that never export the dataset, never build the stakeholder report, and never set a baseline cannot defend their budget line and quietly vanish. The data is the point — treat the export and the report as part of the event.

Ignoring lock-in at signing. A buyer focused only on launch day signs away data export rights, accepts vendor branding, and discovers at renewal that they have no leverage. The contract terms — ownership, export, branding — are easiest to win before you sign.

Over-scoping season one. Trying to digitize an entire city's dining scene in the first season multiplies every other risk: more venues to onboard, more codes to place, more relationships to manage, more ways to fail publicly. The organizers who build durable programs start with one trail, prove it, and expand from a position of evidence.

Prove the model on your own event

Do not take the model on faith — and do not take a vendor's headline numbers on faith either. The honest way to prove it is to run it on a real event already on your calendar: pick one contained trail, place the QR codes, turn on verified check-ins and presence-locked voting, and watch participation in the live dashboard. The mechanics described throughout this guide — physical QR codes at each venue, verified check-ins, voting locked to presence, and a live organizer view of participation — are exactly what produce numbers you can defend in a council report. A program built for a US city's special-events office, a BID district, or a DMO's restaurant week works the same way — same mechanics, same integrity layer, same dashboard, scaled to the size of the event and presented under your own brand. The figure that persuades your board is the one your own pilot generates, not a number from someone else's town.

Getting started

If your city, BID, DMO, chamber, or festival is running a food trail, tasting passport, restaurant week, or tapa crawl on paper this year, the digital version is a short pilot away — not a year-long procurement. The lowest-risk path is the one this guide lays out: pick one contained trail, define the rules, brand it as yours, place the codes, test internally, and launch with a dashboard you can steer the event with. Then let the verified numbers from that pilot make the case for the full program.

See how the mechanics fit together in our companion guides on the QR passport and organizer dashboard, verified voting and defending a winner, and platform cost and pilot budgeting. When you are ready to scope a specific trail, see how it works on the TapaPass platform and request a quote or pilot through our contact page. Pricing for US programs is quote-based and scaled to your event — tell us the trail you have in mind and we will give you an honest read on whether a pilot makes sense and what it would realistically cost.

Frequently asked questions

Do visitors have to download an app?

No. A well-built food trail platform runs as a PWA, so it installs in one tap directly from the browser with no app store and no large download. A visitor can be scanning their first QR code seconds after they open the link, which is the single biggest reason PWAs out-convert native apps for one-weekend events.

How does the platform stop people from voting for dishes they never tried?

Verified check-ins. The visitor scans a physical QR code that exists only at the venue and, on the stronger platforms, uploads a photo of the dish that is validated before the vote is allowed to count. Because the code is physical and location-bound, the vote requires actually being there. No scan and no valid photo means no vote.

How long does it take to launch a digital food trail?

For a single-trail pilot where venues and rules are already decided, about 10 days from a signed agreement to public launch: kick-off on day 1, branding by day 3, codes printed by day 5, internal test on day 7, public launch on day 10. Venue recruitment for a brand-new trail adds lead time before that window.

What does it cost?

Orientatively, $5,000–$20,000 all-in for a single-trail pilot of roughly 10–20 venues in the US in 2026, scaling up for multi-trail or year-round programs. The number depends on venue count, branding depth, and support level. Pricing is quote-based and scaled to the event.

Who owns the data if we don't renew?

You do. A properly structured platform lets you export a full CSV at any time during the program and gives you a complete CSV/JSON export if you choose not to renew. Make data ownership and export rights an explicit contract term before signing.

Can we keep our own branding?

Yes, and you should require it. The passport and dashboard should carry your city's, district's, or organization's identity so visitors experience an official program, not a vendor's product. Confirm this before signing — it is also one of your anti-lock-in protections.

Is this only for big cities?

No. A contained trail of 10–20 venues is an ideal first project for a small town or single district, because the fixed overhead of running a credible event does not shrink much with size while a small pilot keeps cost and risk low. Starting small and expanding beats over-scoping season one.