Travel App Boilerplate for iOS

What a travel app actually needs before day one

A trip planner is deceptively heavy. Before you draw a single itinerary card, a travel app needs user accounts so plans follow people across their phone and iPad, a backend so a trip saved on the couch is there at the airport, a way to keep working when the plane has no signal, and — if it is going to pay for itself — a paywall around premium features like unlimited trips or offline maps. The Swift Kit ships all of that scaffolding. You get Sign in with Apple and email auth, a Supabase Postgres database for storing trips, stops, and bookings, storage for photos and documents, and a RevenueCat paywall you can gate a Pro tier behind. The travel-specific work — the maps, the routing, the place data — is what you write. Everything around it is solved on the day you clone the repo.

The MapKit part — where the kit helps and where you take over

This is a travel boilerplate, so let us be precise about maps. The Swift Kit does not ship a finished map screen or a proprietary place database, and it should not pretend to. What it gives you is a clean SwiftUI architecture — a centralized data layer and per-screen view models — that MapKit slots into without a fight. MapKit is free, native, and handles annotations, camera control, and Look Around out of the box, so an itinerary map is a small amount of code on top of the kit rather than a rewrite of it. You add the MKMapView or SwiftUI Map, your markers, and your routing; the kit gives you the account and sync layer those pins hang off of.

import SwiftUI
import MapKit

struct Stop: Identifiable {
    let id = UUID()
    let name: String
    let coordinate: CLLocationCoordinate2D
}

struct ItineraryMap: View {
    let stops: [Stop]

    var body: some View {
        Map {
            ForEach(stops) { stop in
                Marker(stop.name, coordinate: stop.coordinate)
            }
        }
        .mapControls {
            MapUserLocationButton()
            MapCompass()
        }
    }
}

Offline data and sync — the feature every traveller expects

The moment a travel app stops working on a plane or in a foreign country with no roaming, users delete it. Offline access is not a nice-to-have; it is table stakes. The Swift Kit gives you the pieces to build it honestly. Trips, stops, and itineraries live in Supabase Postgres tied to a real account, and the kit is structured so you cache that data locally and treat the network as an enhancement rather than a requirement. You keep a local copy of the current trip, read from it first, and reconcile with Supabase when a connection returns.

• Supabase Postgres as the source of truth for trips, stops, bookings, and notes
• A centralized data layer that makes a local cache and offline-first reads straightforward to add
• Sign in with Apple plus email so a saved trip syncs across a user's iPhone and iPad
• Supabase storage for trip photos, tickets, and PDF confirmations

Bookings, reminders, and the premium tier

Travel apps make money in two honest ways: a subscription for premium planning features, or affiliate revenue on bookings. The Swift Kit handles the first directly. RevenueCat is wired with a configurable paywall and multi-tier entitlements, so you can offer a free plan capped at one or two trips and a Pro plan with unlimited itineraries, offline maps, and export. Push notifications are included, which is exactly what a travel app leans on — a nudge the night before a flight, a reminder that check-in opens, a heads-up that a saved hotel deal is ending. Analytics and onboarding round it out, so you can see where trip creation drops off and walk new users into their first itinerary without building that flow from scratch.

• RevenueCat paywall for a free vs Pro travel tier, with restore and entitlement checks wired
• Push notifications for flight, check-in, and booking reminders
• Onboarding flow to get a user from install to their first trip fast
• Analytics to see where itinerary creation and paywall views drop off

What you build on top

The Swift Kit is deliberately not a finished travel app. There is no opinionated routing engine, no bundled points-of-interest database, no hotel API. That is the point — your differentiation is the recommendations, the curation, and the trip-building experience, not the login screen. You bring your place data (whether that is MapKit search, a third-party POI API, or your own curated list), your itinerary logic, and your booking integrations. The kit removes the roughly 30% of any travel app that is identical to every other app: accounts, sync, storage, paywall, notifications, and a design system that rethemes from one file so your brand is not fighting the boilerplate.

Building a travel app: from scratch vs with The Swift Kit

Frequently Asked Questions