Guide mode
Guide mode: the app for whoever leads the group
Your guide, tour director or tour leader signs in with a guide code and gets a different app from the one the travelers hold. It is included on every plan.
Somebody has to keep forty people together.
Guide mode is the app for that job.
A guide code, not a traveler’s
The code decides which app opens. A guide’s code opens guide mode; a traveler’s personal code opens the guest app. Neither one can open the other.
Cutting access off is one tap
One tap in the dashboard issues a new guide code when a season ends or a guide moves on. The old code stops working and the phone already carrying it is signed out on the spot. No traveler is touched.
No signal, no difference
The roster, the care notes, the headcount, the day’s plan and every emergency number are read from the copy on the guide’s phone. A message written in a dead zone says so, waits, and sends itself when the bars come back.
The same trip you published
Guide mode reads the published version the travelers hold, not your drafts. Nothing you are still editing turns up on the road, and there is no second itinerary to keep in step.
Care notes come from your dashboard
There is no guide-side data entry. Whatever your office typed in the dietary, mobility and emergency-contact fields is exactly what the roster shows. Keep the dashboard right and the road is right.
The roster sits behind a PIN
Care notes and guests’ emergency contacts unlock with a four-digit PIN the guide sets on their own phone, and lock again once the app has been shut a while. A phone left on a coach seat doesn’t hand over your travelers’ medical notes.
The numbers are never locked
Police and ambulance, your office line, the embassy and tonight’s hotel sit outside the PIN, on one screen, offline. In a crisis nobody should have to remember four digits first.
Somebody presses SOS
Every guide phone on the departure is sent a push — “SOS — Ruth Delgado needs help” — a red card takes over the top of the guide’s home screen with their name, and Locations pins them first with the time, how precise the position is, and a button that dials.
“I’ve got them”
One tap marks it handled and the traveler’s phone is told, in those words: Your guide is on it. And if that tap doesn’t reach us, the guide is told in plain words that the traveler’s phone has not been told — instead of walking away assuming it was.
Starters that won’t send a blank
Tap-to-fill message openers — “Bus leaves at ___” — and both the phone and the server refuse to send while a blank is still in it. A message to the whole group cannot be unsent.
What a guide cannot do
Guide mode is read-only about the trip itself. A guide can message the group and close an SOS. They cannot change a day, add or remove a traveler, move a hotel or a flight, or open any departure but the one they signed in for.
What that changes back at the office.
You stop being the only person who can answer. When the coach moves to the other side of the square, whoever is standing there sends the message — to everyone, with the names of whoever hasn’t read it — instead of calling a desk that is six hours behind and shut. You can still send the same message from the dashboard; both land in one list that both of you read, so neither is guessing what the other already said.
And your guide stops running the trip off paper. No printed roster with the allergies written in the margin. No group text half the group never joined. No counting to forty twice in a parking lot because you lost your place at eleven. The list is the one your office typed, the count is a grid of names, and the message reaches the whole group, not the half who joined the group text.
In detail: guides and guide mode for the office, and the guide’s own pages on roster and headcount, messaging the group and the emergency screen.
Location sharing
Find the two people who wandered off. Without tracking anyone.
Sharing is off until a traveler turns it on, runs for a short timed session, and expires by itself. There is no background tracking in Cordelle and there never will be — it isn't a setting we hid, it's a thing we didn't build.
The guide sees a map of whoever is currently sharing. Anyone not sharing simply reads “Not sharing — that's their choice, and it's fine.”
An SOS ping is the one exception: a traveler can send their position once, deliberately, even with sharing switched off.
Travelers get the same explanation in plain words before they ever say yes: location sharing, explained.