The guest book

A departure's roster answers "who is on this trip." The guest book, on the People page, answers the older question: "who travels with us?" One record per person, across every season — their trips, their contact details, your notes — visible to your office only, and part of every plan.

How a person gets in

Mostly, you do nothing. Whenever a traveler with an email address lands on a roster — typed in by hand, pasted in a CSV, pulled from WeTravel, or sent by your own system through the API — the guest book looks that email up, creates the person if they are new, and adds this departure to their trip history. Add the Hendersons to next year's departure and their record simply grows a trip. A traveler with no email links to nobody; you can merge them in by hand later.

A link never overwrites what you typed: if the guest-book record already has a phone number, an incoming roster row with a different one leaves it alone.

Bringing your history in

There are two buttons on the People page for the past, and they do different jobs:

• Link past rosters walks the departures already in Cordelle — finished ones included — and files everyone on them into the guest book by email. It works in chunks, so a big history takes a few presses of the same button, and it is safe to run twice: nobody is doubled. Travelers without a usable email are counted and left for hand-merging.
• Import a season takes a CSV from before Cordelle — old spreadsheets with names, emails, phones and a trip label and date — and creates guest-book records and trips only. It never creates departures or travelers, so it cannot touch your plan's departure or traveler limits. Headers are matched by meaning ("First name", "Email", "Trip label", "Trip date"), unknown columns are ignored and named back to you, and up to 1,000 rows go in per file.

Repeat guests, visible where you work

A person whose history holds more than one trip gets a repeat badge — on the People page, on the departure's Travelers tab and on Who's ready — so "they've traveled with us before" is something the whole office can see at a glance rather than something one person remembers. Guides never see it: the guest book belongs to the office, and nothing from it reaches the guide or traveler apps.

Merging duplicates

The same person under two emails becomes two records. Open one, choose merge, pick the other: the trips and roster links move to the record you keep, and the person's notes, to-dos, money history and referrals follow them. Cordelle never merges on its own — no fuzzy matching, ever. A merge can be unmerged, which returns the person's trips and roster links to the old record; notes, to-dos, money history and referrals stay with the record you kept.

Notes and to-dos

Every record takes notes — "prefers a ground-floor room," "husband handles the booking" — each stamped with who wrote it and when. A note cannot be edited afterwards, on purpose: the stamp is only worth something if the words under it can't quietly change. Wrote the wrong thing? Delete it and write it again. That, plus who-said-what-when, is what makes the notes a record rather than a rumor.

The To-dos page is the office's list: a title, an optional due date, who it's for, and optionally which guest or departure it's about. Overdue and due-today items surface first. Deleting a guest detaches their to-dos rather than deleting them — the to-do was your office's, not the record's.

Who to call this season

Who to call, under People, builds call lists from your own history: guests who traveled one year but not the next, everyone who has ever done a given tour, and your repeat guests. Each list shows names, phone and email, ready to work through — and exports as a CSV for your own email tool.

• "Do not contact" is honored where it matters. A guest flagged do-not-contact still appears on screen, flagged — your office must be able to see who asked to be left alone — but is held out of the CSV export unless you explicitly include them.
• Cordelle never sends the mail. The list is yours; any campaign goes out from your own tools, under your own name. Cordelle emails your guests nothing.

Group leaders

The person who brings you a group — a parish organizer, a club secretary — can wear a leader's hat on their guest-book record: their organization, your notes on the arrangement, and a running count of the guests and travelers they brought you. Mark a guest as referred by a leader on the guest's record. There's no commission calculator and no math — your arrangement with a leader is yours; the guest book just remembers it.

Export and delete

• Export everyone as one CSV, or export one person — their details, every trip, and every note — from their record. If a guest asks what you hold on them, that download answers most of it; money records live with each departure's ledger — see Paperwork & money.
• Delete a record and the person's guest-book entry, trips and notes go at once. Their rows on past departure rosters are unlinked, never deleted — your trip history stays whole; the person's cross-season record is gone.

What travelers and guides never see

All of it. The guest book, its notes, to-dos, call lists and leader records live in the dashboard only — never in the traveler app, never in guide mode, never in the published trip bundle, the printed packet or a webhook. Nothing on this page changes what a traveler's phone shows.