Live flight status

On Pro, every group flight carries a live line — the gate and terminal, a delay, a cancellation, and the baggage belt after landing — on every traveler's phone, the guide's, and your Logistics tab. It comes from an airline-data feed, a notification goes out when something changes that a traveler would act on, and the line always says how old it is.

What travelers see

The Flights screen keeps showing the scheduled details you entered. Once the airline publishes more, each flight gains a short status, the gate and terminal, the revised time when there is one, and — after landing — the baggage belt. Under it sits a line such as "Airline data as of 12 minutes ago · check the boards too." If nothing has been heard for three hours, that line turns amber. A flight that left more than six hours ago, and that the airline never reported on, shows no live line at all — the app does not guess.

The Today tab puts the next flight first, so nobody has to dig: the departure time (with the new time when it slips), the gate and terminal once posted, then after landing the baggage belt and the next flight when there is a connection — and the last alert that was sent about it, in the same words.

Like the rest of the app, the last status the phone received stays readable with no signal. A new gate or delay, and the notification about it, arrives the next time the phone has a connection.

What gets pushed

Every phone on the departure — travelers and guide — gets a notification for:

• The gate or terminal when it is first posted, and any change while the flight is still on the ground.
• A delay of 15 minutes or more, then again each time it grows or shrinks past another 15-minute mark while still 15 minutes or more. When a delayed flight comes back to within five minutes of schedule, that is said too.
• Canceled or diverted — marked urgent, telling travelers to find their guide, and sent as soon as Cordelle is watching the flight (see below).
• Landed, and then the baggage belt when it appears.

Three quiet rules keep this from becoming noise: nothing but a cancellation or diversion is pushed more than 24 hours before departure; no flight sends more than one routine alert every ten minutes (a cancellation or diversion doesn't wait); and the same fact is never pushed twice. A change that arrives during those ten minutes, or before the last day, is not lost — it is on the screen at once and sent at the next check (every fifteen minutes) once it may be. If the flight belongs to an air group, the group's name leads the alert so a traveler on a different booking can ignore it at a glance.

When it starts

Once the departure is published, Cordelle begins watching each flight about 36 hours before its departure and stops six hours after its scheduled arrival. Draft trips aren't watched. Airlines mostly publish gates in the last few hours, so expect the live line the day before at the earliest and, most often, on the day. A cancellation announced earlier than that reaches the group as soon as the feed reports it, and Cordelle checks the flight directly three hours before departure in any case.

What you need to enter

It all keys off the flights on the Logistics tab, so they need to be the real thing. On Pro you rarely type a time: enter the flight number, pick the Date to look up, and Cordelle asks the airline feed and fills in both airports and both times — check them against the ticket, then save.

• A published departure — draft trips aren't watched.
• The airline and the flight number as the airline writes it — TP 208, DL 273. For a codeshare, use the number of the airline actually flying it.
• Three-letter airport codes — LIS, EWR. A code Cordelle doesn't recognize is refused with a message naming it.
• Departure and arrival times as the local time at that airport. The dashboard says so next to each field; that is also how the app shows them.

What it isn't

Cordelle is not the airline and does not pretend to be. The feed is best-effort, and what it carries differs by airport and airline: some publish gates, terminals and belts, some only delays and departed/landed, and an update can be late or missing. (Salt Lake City, for one, reports status and delays but no gates.) The app says "check the boards too" for a reason. It does not rebook anyone or call anyone — the office sees the same line in Logistics, and a guide broadcast is still how you tell the group what to do next.

Plans

Live flight status is part of Pro, and of the free trial. On Companion, travelers still get the scheduled details, and the Flights screen says live updates aren't switched on for this trip. Your Billing page says whether it is on.

If a card payment fails mid-trip, nothing changes for the group — Stripe keeps retrying and the live line stays on. If the plan is canceled or the trial ends mid-trip, phones keep the last status they received, marked with its age, but no new updates arrive.

Privacy

The only things about your trip that go to the airline-data provider are a flight's number and date, plus the web address Cordelle wants updates posted to. No traveler's name, booking or phone leaves for it. See the privacy policy.