Tour guides and guide mode

The overview for owners: guide mode.

Whoever leads the group on the ground gets their own mode of the same app: the roster with care notes, headcounts, group messages and the emergency numbers, all working offline. This page covers a guide's code and PIN, what the guide actually sees, and how to cut off access the day it needs cutting off.

Guide codes vs. traveler codes

A guide is a person, not a field on one trip. You write your guides down once on the Guides page, and each of them gets their own six-character sign-in code with a Copy button beside it. That code belongs to them and works on whichever of their trips is running, so a guide who leads four departures a season carries one code, not four. You pick which of them is on each trip from the departure's Travel tab.

Each departure also keeps a code of its own, on the Guide sign-in card of its Travelers tab. It signs in as that trip's first guide — the one travelers see — and then asks for that person's PIN, so it is a convenience, not a spare key for the second guide on the trip. Everyone else uses their own code from the Guides page.

A code alone opens nothing. Same download and same Enter your trip code screen as a traveler; the difference is that a guide code is answered with a PIN screen, and only the right four digits put the phone into guide mode.

What the guide sees

Guide mode opens on eight oversized tools, not a dashboard: Message Group, Headcount, Roster, Locations, Today, Flights and Emergency. The roster, the care notes, the day's plan and every emergency number are saved on the phone after the first sync, so a parking lot with no signal changes nothing; a message written there waits and sends itself when the bars come back.

1. Roster — every traveler with their party, phone number, dietary and mobility notes, and emergency contacts, searchable and filterable by Dietary, Mobility, Not joined and Sent a status. Each entry also carries that traveler's join code, so the guide can help a guest reinstall on the road.
2. Headcount — tap names instead of counting heads twice. Counts live entirely on the guide's phone: no server round trip, so it works mid-mountain.
3. Message Group — the megaphone; see the next section.
4. Locations — whoever is currently sharing, on a map, under the same consent rules as your dashboard's Where they are tab. See Locations & safety.
5. Today — the day's plan, same itinerary the guests carry.
6. Flights — gates and delays, as the airline last said. The same screen the travelers see; see Live flight status.
7. Documents — the trip's confirmation and policy numbers, the same list the travelers carry, to read out to a guest who left their packet in the room.
8. Emergency — every number they might need in one place.

Care notes: entered at the office, carried on the road

The roster shows exactly what your office typed into the dashboard — the dietary notes, mobility notes and emergency contact fields on each traveler's row of the Travelers tab. There is no separate guide-side data entry: keep the dashboard accurate and the guide's phone is accurate.

The guide's PIN: you open the door, they choose the digits

Because that data is sensitive, a guide code is only half of a sign-in. The other half is a four-digit PIN the guide chooses themselves and types every time. You never see it, and there is nowhere in the dashboard it can be looked up. It also locks the Roster and Emergency screens on their phone, so one number covers both.

A guide cannot set that PIN whenever they feel like it, and that is the point: their code is printed on packets and sent in texts, so on its own it must never be enough to invent a PIN with. Choosing one happens inside a window you open, and most of the time you open it without thinking about it — putting somebody on a trip gives them seven days to choose their PIN, and clearing a forgotten PIN gives them seven more.

When that week has run out — a guide staffed in June for a trip in October, a phone replaced late in the season — their card on Guides says so: No PIN yet beside "Cannot set one until you let them". Choose Let them set a PIN on that person and they get another seven days; the card then reads "Can set one until…". Do it while they are on the phone with you and you know the person who sets the PIN is the person you meant. Their own app tells them to call you, in those words, so the two halves meet.

Forgotten it? Open Guides, find the person, and choose Clear their PIN. They pick a new one the next time they sign in, nobody in the office ever sees it, and a phone they are already signed in on stays signed in. Nothing on their phone is wiped, and you do not need a second click — clearing opens the window they need. That is also the way out of a lockout after eight wrong tries: clearing the PIN lifts it straight away, so nobody has to wait fifteen minutes.

While a lockout is in force, the guide's card shows it — "Locked out, opens in 12 min" — and so does their row on the trip's own Travel tab, so a guide phoning in from abroad is a problem you can see from whichever page you happen to be on.

Messages: from the office, or from the coach

Two places can send an update — to Everyone, to Some travelers picked from the roster, or to A party — and it lands identically in the inbox of each traveler it was addressed to:

1. From the dashboard — the departure's Updates tab: a title, optional detail, Normal or Urgent priority, Who gets it, and the send button, whose label says who it goes to (Send to all travelers, Send to 3 travelers, Send to the Okafor party). Sent updates carry a "To:" line and list who was reached — only the people it went to — with per-traveler delivered and seen detail behind Who has seen it?.
2. From the guide's phone — Message Group, with the same three choices under Who should get it? and tap-to-fill starters like "Bus leaves at ___". The guide sees the same read receipts: "Seen by 8 of 12", and how many phones haven't been reached yet.

A party is whoever carries that label on the roster at the moment of sending; someone moved into the party afterwards does not get the message. A traveler's inbox shows only the messages addressed to them, and nobody is told who else received one.

Both paths follow the same rules. The title is required (on a locked phone it may be the only line a guest sees); the detail is optional — "Bus leaves at 2:00" is a whole message. A starter whose ___ blank hasn't been filled in refuses to send, on the phone and at the server, because a broadcast can't be unsent. Urgent messages are highlighted on guests' phones — the guide app says it plainly: use it sparingly.

A message composed with no signal queues on the guide's phone — labeled plainly as waiting for internet — and sends itself on reconnect, without duplicating if the first attempt half-landed. Every message records who sent it, so office and guide always know whose words the group is reading.

Issuing a new code: the kill switch

A guide's phone gets lost, a season ends, a code ends up on a slide it shouldn't have been on. A new code is the answer, and from the departure page it is deliberately wide: the departure gets a fresh code, every guide assigned to that departure gets a fresh personal code too, and every one of their phones is signed out — including on their other trips, because a lost phone is lost for all of them. Hand each of them their new code from the Guides page. Travelers are untouched; no guest notices anything.

Retiring somebody is the other lever, on the Guides page: their code stops working, every phone they are signed in on is signed out, travelers stop seeing their name, and the trips they have run stay on the record. You can bring them back later.

A signed-out guide phone fails safe, not dark: it shows "Your guide code has expired", keeps everything already saved readable, and can't send anything new. The app tells the guide to ask the office for a new code, then leave the trip and sign in again — and warns that leaving discards any unsent queued messages.

Two rotations happen by design without asking: copying a departure for next season mints a fresh guide code (last season's guide phone opens nothing on the copy), and deleting a departure ends its guide code along with everything else.

Pointing your guide at their own instructions

This help center has a guide-facing section written for the road, in plain short sentences: joining as a guide, messages, roster & headcount, locations and emergency. Send those links with the guide code.