Tours & departures
Build a tour once, then run it every season as a dated departure with its own roster. This page covers the itinerary builder, what publishing actually does, copying a departure instead of retyping it, the readiness grid, and how deleting is guarded.
A tour vs. a departure
A tour is the trip as you sell it — a name and an optional internal description, like "Portugal Explorer". A departure is one dated run of that tour: "September 2026", with real start and end dates, a time zone, a guide, an itinerary, and its own travelers. Everything guests ever see belongs to a departure; the tour is just the shelf it sits on.
Both live on the Tours & departures page (the dashboard's home). Create a tour with the Create a new tour form at the bottom, then press Add a departure on the tour's card. A departure asks for:
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Departure name | What you call this run — "September 2026" is the pattern the dashboard suggests. |
| Start date / End date | The trip's real calendar dates. |
| Time zone | Where the tour takes place (for example Europe/Lisbon) — itinerary times are local to it. |
| Guide name / Guide phone | Optional. Shown to travelers and used on the emergency screen. See Guides. |
Inside a departure
Opening a departure gives you seven tabs: Itinerary, Travelers, Logistics (hotels and flights), Packing, Broadcasts, Readiness and Locations. Above the tabs sit the departure's status, the Offline bundle card with the publish button, a Print paper packet link, and the guide's join code.
A departure's status is one of Draft, Published, On tour or Complete, changed with the Change status control at the top of the page. Status is a label for your own workflow — what travelers can see is decided by publishing, below. Departures in draft, published or on-tour status count toward your plan's active departures; setting one to Complete moves it out of the way and frees the slot.
The itinerary builder
The Itinerary tab is a list of days, collapsed by default — click a day to open it. Add a day asks for the day number (1 = first day of the trip), its date, a title, and an optional one-or-two-sentence summary guests see at the top of the day.
Inside a day, Add item to day N creates one event on the day's timeline: a time, a title, an optional location ("Hotel lobby / restaurant name") and optional details (dress code, what to bring). Each item has a kind, which the traveler app uses to mark the timeline: Meal, Activity, Transfer, Meeting point, Flight or Free time. Free time is deliberately an item, not a gap — travelers want to know it's intended.
Changes here are saved right away, but guests only see them after you publish a new bundle version. You can build and rearrange for days without a single traveler seeing work in progress.
Publishing: drafts stay private
Publishing is the one moment content leaves the dashboard. Pressing Publish first version (later, Publish new version) compiles the departure — itinerary, hotels, flights, packing list, country guides, your branding — into an immutable, numbered offline bundle. The dashboard confirms first: every guest's app will download the new version the next time it has a connection.
- Until the first publish, joined phones have nothing to download — the bundle card says so.
- Every publish creates a new version: v1, v2, v3. Travelers only ever see a version you signed off.
- Edits after a publish stay private again until the next one. The paper packet, by contrast, always prints the working copy — it warns you when that differs from what's published.
Run it again next season: Make a copy
Retyping last year's itinerary is the chore Cordelle exists to remove. On the Tours & departures page every departure row has a Make a copy button; on the departure page itself the same form sits under Run this trip again as Copy this departure.
The form arrives pre-filled with next year's version of the same trip — same month and day, same length, the year in the name bumped — and every field is editable. When you confirm, every itinerary date shifts by the same amount as the new start date, so day 3 is still day 3.
| Comes across | Does not come across |
|---|---|
| Every itinerary day and item, dates moved to the new start | Travelers and their join codes |
| Hotels, flights, the packing list | Anything you've published |
| Attached country guides (the attachment — the guides themselves belong to your agency) | Updates you've sent |
| Time zone, guide name and phone, as prefills to correct | The guide code — the copy mints a fresh one |
The copy starts as a Draft with its own new guide code — so last season's guide phone opens nothing, and no guest sees a word of it until you publish. Flights carry over verbatim as a starting point: next season's flights are genuinely different flights, so correct them like the rest of the copy.
The readiness grid
The Readiness tab — "Trip readiness" — is your call list before wheels-up. It checks every traveler's device and sorts worst-first, with count cards across the top: how many are ready, out of date, and how many need a call.
| Row status | What to do |
|---|---|
| Has not joined the app | Call them and read out their join code — it's right there in the row. |
| Joined, but nothing on their device yet | Ask them to open the app while on Wi-Fi. |
| Waiting for you to publish the first bundle | Nothing to download yet — their app will pick it up once you publish. |
| Out of date — has v2, current is v3 | They'll catch up next time the app opens with a connection. |
| Up to date (v3) | Nothing — they're ready to go offline. |
Each row also shows when the phone last checked in and how many sent updates the traveler hasn't seen yet.
Deleting a departure
Deleting is guarded, because it's the one irreversible thing an operator can do here. Delete this departure at the bottom of the departure page first shows you exactly what goes with it — days and items, travelers and their join codes, published versions, sent updates, hotels, flights, packing items — and then makes you type the departure's own name, exactly, before Delete it for good does anything. A mistyped name deletes nothing.
A departure that is On tour cannot be deleted. Its travelers are leaning on it today. Set it to Complete when the group is home — then it can be deleted. And in most cases Complete is the better ending anyway: it keeps the record and moves the trip out of your way. Deleting is for a departure that should never have existed.
After a delete, guests keep whatever is already on their phones until the app next reaches the server — then it stops loading, and their join codes stop working, the guide's included. Your country guides stay put: they belong to the agency, not to any departure.
Deleting a tour
A tour can only be deleted once it's empty. While departures still hang off it, the dashboard says so and points at the fix — delete them from their own pages first — rather than letting one click take a season of history. An empty tour deletes with the same type-its-name confirmation: Delete this tour.
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