•The potential of the use of smartphones in travel behaviour studies seems promising.•The use of smartphones could eliminate many problems that traditional surveys face.•Uneven distribution of mobile phones in the society causes sampling problems.•Important barriers are technological issues and limitations in big data analyses.•Broader use of smartphones in travel behaviour surveys is a distant perspective. Human travel behaviour has recently been one of the most popular topics in transport studies. Therefore, the ability to obtain valuable sets of data has become one of the key challenges for researchers. Traditional mobility surveys have many important limitations. In this situation, the potential of the use of smartphones and dedicated applications in the identification of individual travel behaviour seem very promising. We set ourselves a goal to indicate strengths and weaknesses of data obtained with this method and assess the perspectives of its use for the needs of public policies. For these purposes we prepared a low-cost mobile application and conducted a pilot study among students in Poznań (Poland). In effect, trajectories of more than 100 people with almost 3 billion of location data were collected. Based on a literature review and our results we discuss the main problems, limitations and challenges of the broader use of the data obtained with smartphones. In the conclusion, we argue that there is a huge and increasing potential connected with mobile phones, but still some important barriers exist including sampling problems, limitations in big data analyses and technological issues. Therefore, a broader use of smartphones in travel behaviour surveys seems to be rather a distant perspective.