Getting started

Cordelle is self-serve from the first click: you sign up, brand the app, build a departure, and publish it to your travelers' phones without ever waiting on us. This page walks the whole road from a blank account to your first join codes going out.

See it on your phone first

You do not need an account to see the traveler app. Install it from the App Store or Google Play and join with the demo code on the home page — that section also has a link to open on the phone itself, which shows the code and the right store for that phone. It is a real trip through Portugal on our own demo agency; switch on airplane mode and it keeps working. Your guides get a different app — ask us for the guide code to see the roster and the headcount from their side.

Sign up

The dashboard lives at app.cordelle.io/signup. Fill in four fields: your agency's name (guests see this in the app — you can change it later), your own name, an email address, and a password of at least 8 characters. The email becomes the owner sign-in for your agency. Press Create my agency and you're in — signing up itself needs no card.

Every new agency starts on a 30-day free trial with full Pro limits: unlimited active departures and up to 1,000 travelers for the year, every feature included. There is no cut-down trial version — what you evaluate is the product.

Add a card to start building

Your 30 days began the moment you signed up. Before you can create tours, the dashboard asks you to put a card on file — the first item on the welcome checklist, Add a card to start building. It sends you to the Billing page, where you pick Companion or Pro and add the card at Stripe's secure checkout.

While you're trialing, a banner at the top of the dashboard counts down the days left, and the Billing page shows exactly which plan and limits apply. The details — plans, usage meters, what happens at the end of the trial — are on the Billing page of this help center.

The welcome checklist

After signup you land on the Welcome page, and a Getting started link stays in the dashboard header until you've finished it. The checklist is honest by construction: it checks your real data every time you visit, so nothing is marked done until it actually is — and if you delete your only tour, the step un-completes itself.

1. Add a card to start building. Covered above. (This step only appears while you're trialing without a card on file.)
2. Create your first trip. Start from scratch, or load the sample tour (more below).
3. Add travelers. One at a time or by pasting a spreadsheet — each traveler gets a short join code, and that code is all they ever need. No passwords.
4. Publish. Publishing builds the offline bundle guests download. Until you publish, joined phones have nothing to fetch — after it, the whole trip works with no signal at all.
5. Join it on your phone. As soon as a departure with travelers on it is published, this step lays out everything a phone needs: one traveler's join code from that departure, the guide code (with a note on its PIN), a QR code your phone's camera can scan, and Get it for iPhone / Get it for Android links. Install the app, type the traveler code, and watch the whole trip land on your phone — then switch on airplane mode and keep reading. The guide code opens guide mode: headcount, roster and the megaphone. The step ticks itself off once a phone has downloaded the trip, and its button takes you to Who's ready.
6. Brand your app (optional, and last). Pick an appearance and an accent color — guests see your brand on their phones, not ours. The out-of-the-box look works fine until you get to it.

Load the sample tour

The fastest way to see the shape of the product is the Load the sample tour button on the Welcome page. One click instantiates Highlights of Portugal in your agency: a finished 8-day departure with an itinerary, hotels, flights, a country guide, a packing list, and six clearly fake travelers (their emails are all at example.com). Open it, poke at every tab, publish it — and once the traveler app is on your phone, join it with one of the sample codes. Delete it whenever you like. Nothing about it is special; it's an ordinary departure you didn't have to type.

Brand the app

On the Branding page you upload a logo (PNG, JPEG or WebP), choose a light or dark appearance, and pick a color preset — or set your own accent and background as hex values. A live phone preview updates as you change things, and a built-in readability check verifies the contrast of every combination: if your accent can't carry legible text, Cordelle adjusts it until it can, and tells you so. Press Save branding when it looks right. The full walkthrough is on the Branding page.

Build your first departure

In Cordelle a tour is the trip as a product ("Portugal Explorer") and a departure is one dated run of it ("September 2026") with its own itinerary and its own roster. On the Tours & departures page, create a tour, then use Add a departure to give it a name, start and end dates, the time zone the tour takes place in, and — optionally — the guide's name and phone.

Opening the departure gets you eleven tabs — Days, Travelers, Travel (hotels, flights and guides), Rooms & seats, Paperwork, Money, Packing, Updates, Group, Who's ready, Where they are — where the actual building happens. That's its own article: Tours & departures.

Publish, then invite

Everything you type stays private to the dashboard until you press Publish first version on the departure page. Publishing compiles the trip into a versioned offline bundle — the thing travelers' phones download and keep. Edit freely afterward; guests keep seeing the published version until you publish again.

With a version published, go to the Travelers tab and email everyone their join code in one click. The email carries the code set large, install steps, a link that works whether or not the app is installed yet, and a QR code — and the dashboard tells you exactly who was skipped and why, so nobody falls through. The whole flow, including CSV import and the printed code slips, is covered in Travelers & invites.

As travelers land on rosters, the guest book on the People page starts remembering them across seasons on its own. Two buttons there bring your past in whenever you are ready: Link past rosters files everyone from the departures you have already run in Cordelle, and Import a season takes the spreadsheets from before it. Both are covered in The guest book.