Digital Passport — Disclaimer & How We Verify

This page explains what a SouthWestCoast Verified Completion certificate is — and just as importantly, what it is not.

What is the Digital Passport?

Who we are, and who we are not

SouthWestCoast is an independent app and website made for people walking the South West Coast Path. We are not the founders, creators, maintainers, or governing body of the trail itself, and we are not affiliated with, appointed by, or endorsed by any trail association, trail authority, tourism organization, or government body.

Where a certificate or other document carries the word “Founder”, it refers to the founder of this app and platform — never to the founding or ownership of the trail.

Our certificates are not official documents

A “Verified Completion” certificate is issued by SouthWestCoast, the operator of this platform. It records that our systems verified a walk, and nothing more. It is not an official document of any trail authority, carries no official recognition, and is not a qualification, licence, permit, or safety credential of any kind.

How we verify a walk

Certificates are earned automatically — they cannot be requested, and they cannot be bought. A certificate is issued only when the recorded activity on a hiker's account satisfies our technical checks, which include:

• GPS tracking — the hiker's phone recording their position along the trail while they walk with our app;
• stage coverage — the recorded route actually covering the trail's stages, stage by stage, not just visiting points on it;
• consistency checks — timing, movement, and other technical parameters that must line up with a walk that really happened.

Only hikers whose recorded activity satisfies these technical methods receive a certificate. There is no manual path around them — not for purchase, and not on request.

The honest limits of that verification

We verify walks to the best of what is technically possible on a consumer phone — and we want to be plain about what that means:

• consumer GPS has inherent accuracy limits, and phones differ in how reliably they record;
• we verify recorded data; we do not physically observe anyone on the trail;
• our checks are designed to catch inconsistencies, but no purely technical method can rule out every conceivable form of misrepresentation.

A certificate therefore means: the activity recorded on this account satisfied our technical verification at the time of issue. We stand behind that — and we claim nothing beyond it. Certificates found to have been obtained dishonestly can be withdrawn, at which point their verification link stops confirming them.

Passport stamps are souvenirs

The Digital Passport also holds stamps, badges, collections, and rewards collected along the way. These are keepsakes, and they are deliberately kept separate from verification: stamps play no part in earning a certificate, and no number of stamps ever produces one.

Premium editions

A premium certificate differs from the free one only in presentation — a personal photo and an issuer signature. The verification behind it is identical, and a premium edition can no more be bought without the walk than the free one can. Payment never influences whether a certificate is earned.

Checking a certificate

Every certificate carries a QR code and link to its own verification page on this site. That page reads from our records directly: if a certificate was not earned — or has been withdrawn — the page will say so, whatever a PDF might claim. The verification page is the document of record; the PDF is a keepsake.