--- title: "Reference Data: the master lists" url: https://tourcockpit.com/help/reference-data lang: en description: "Reference Data is where a manager keeps the master lists everything else reads: hotels, zones, pickup times, prices, drivers, vehicles and child seats. Tour operators have their own screen, Operators. Every dropdown on the board offers exactly what these tabs hold, so keeping them tidy is what keeps the day's screens clean." --- # Reference Data: the master lists Reference Data is where a manager keeps the master lists everything else reads: hotels, zones, pickup times, prices, drivers, vehicles and child seats. Tour operators have their own screen, Operators. Every dropdown on the board offers exactly what these tabs hold, so keeping them tidy is what keeps the day's screens clean. ## What is Reference Data? One screen, seven tabs, each holding one list. The board never asks you to type a hotel or a van from memory: its pickers read these lists. Add something here and it is offered everywhere; retire it and it stops being offered while everything already booked keeps it. On the five tabs that hold a list, Hotels, Zones, Drivers, Vehicles and Child seats, click anywhere on a row and it turns into its own form, in place, with Save and Cancel at the end of it. The three dots at the end of the row hold the same Edit and the row's other actions, and clicking them opens only the menu, never the form behind it. Pickup times and Prices are grids rather than lists, and a cell there is edited where it sits. Reference Data is a manager screen: the lists everything on the board is picked from. ## What lives on the Hotels tab? Every hotel the office picks up from, with one important column: its Zone. The zone is what lets TourCockpit fill in a booking's pickup time by itself, because each tour keeps one pickup time per zone. The zone dropdown on each row saves the moment you change it, and it offers no blank: a hotel always belongs to a zone. A hotel is never left without a zone, because a hotel with no zone answers no pickup time, and a guest on the manifest with an empty time column is what zones exist to prevent. The zone is asked for when the hotel is added and cannot be emptied afterwards, only changed to another zone. ## How do I add a hotel? 1. Open Reference Data and stay on the Hotels tab. 2. Type the hotel's name in Add hotel at the top of the list. The name must be new; a duplicate is refused. 3. Pick its Zone beside the name. The dropdown starts on Choose a zone and the form will not take the hotel without one, because the zone is what answers its pickup times. 4. Press Add hotel. From then on every booking from that hotel gets its pickup time by itself. A hotel can also be added from the booking you are typing, without coming here: the hotel dropdown's last line offers Add "…" with whatever you typed. That is the same hotel, on the same list; this screen is where it is kept afterwards. ## What are the Zones and Pickup times tabs? Zones are the stretches of coast the van drives through, kept in the order it actually drives them: drag a zone by its grip (or anywhere on the row with the mouse; on a phone, press and hold first) to where it belongs, and the pickup grid's columns follow. Pickup times opens on the grid, with one row per published tour and one column per zone, and under it Company times, the hours this company departs at, which the office adds to and retires itself. A cell starts as Not set and becomes a time, or No stop where that tour does not collect from that zone. A Not set cell is also answered from a booking: a manager who types a time there may tick a box to make it that zone's answer for every future booking, which adds the time to Company times too, or brings a retired one back. So a time you did not add here can appear on the list, and the Activity Log says who put it there. That is deliberately the short version. How the grid resolves onto bookings, what the office can override, and what changing the grid later does are all on their own page: Zones, hotels and pickup times, linked below. ## What is the Prices tab for? A tour has one adult price and one child price, set on the tour itself. The Prices tab is where a zone charges more than that, because the far zones cost more to reach: the same tours down the side and the same zones across the top as the pickup grid, with an adult box and a child box in each cell. A tour sold by the vehicle has no fares for a zone to raise, so its row holds no boxes at all: every cell reads Priced per vehicle, and that tour costs the same from every zone. Leave a box empty and the tour's own price applies, and that price is the grey number inside the empty box, so a blank cell never leaves you guessing. The two boxes are independent: raise the adult fare from one zone and the child fare stays at the tour's until you raise that too. Two kinds of tour take no child fare from a zone: one with no child price of its own, and one marked Adults only. Their child boxes are off and read n.a., both in the cell and beside the tour's own price down the side, while the adult box works as it does anywhere else, so a far zone still charges more. A booking keeps the amount it was taken at. Editing a cell changes what new bookings from that zone cost and never what a guest has already been quoted. The full rule, including what happens when a booking's hotel changes, is on Zones, hotels and pickup times, linked below. ## What does a driver need? A name, a phone number, and at least one spoken language, and an email if the office sends them the day's board. The name is what appears as the GUIA on the board's tour blocks, the phone is how the office reaches the guide on the road, and the email is where Export sends the board when they are ticked. The languages under Speaks are required, and they are load-bearing: a booking goes only on a tour whose guide speaks its language, from every way in, all read from this list. Taking a language away from a guide is refused, with the days, while they guide guests in it on a day still to come: assign another guide to those tours first. The roster is one roster: the same person guides one day and drives the next, so everyone on it has languages on file. ## What does a vehicle's seat count do? The vehicle's name is the FURGO label on the board, and its Seats number is what that van can carry. Assign a vehicle to a tour and the tour's capacity becomes that vehicle's seats: bookings stop being accepted when the van is full, and the board warns in red if a day is over. ## How do child seats work? Each option is a short Code the way the office writes it (S1, E1, S1+E1) plus one Description of what it actually means, written once, in your company's language. The form says which language that is. Every other language the app speaks is translated for you a few seconds after you save; nobody is asked to write German. Drag a row by its grip to change the order, the way zones are ordered; that is the order the booking pickers offer them in. The description travels because the code alone means nothing to anyone untrained on the sheet, and it reaches the customer: it shows in the booking pickers, as the legend on the printed manifest, and inside outgoing messages, always in the reader's own language. An Italian operator reading S1+E1 gets the Italian sentence; the Spanish driver holding the manifest gets the Spanish one. Until a language has arrived, the reader sees your own sentence, never a blank. Open a row and Other languages sits under the description, closed. Open it to read what the app wrote for each language and what it is: automatic, translating…, edited by you, or edited by you · the original changed since, which is what a language reads when the description was reworded after somebody wrote that language by hand. Someone who speaks a language can type their own wording in its box. Keep my version stays greyed until what you have typed differs from what is stored, so it offers to act only when there is something to act on; press it and the app stops writing over that language, even after you reword the original. Back to automatic then appears beside that language and hands it back: your words stay exactly as they are when the description has not moved since you wrote them, and the app writes the language afresh when it has. Nobody has to open it. ## Why can I retire things but never delete them? Every tab works the same way: Retire, never delete. It sits at the foot of each row's three dots and asks once before it acts; on the Pickup times tab each time carries its own Retire button. A retired hotel, operator, driver, vehicle, zone or child seat drops out of the pickers immediately, but stays exactly as it was on every past booking and printed manifest. On its own tab it moves to the end of the list, its name struck through and its Retired chip kept, and it still opens and still has its three dots. History is never rewritten. The one entry that can refuse to be retired is a zone with hotels still in it: there is nowhere for them to go, so it offers no Retire (only Edit), the row says how many are in the way, and the way out is to move them to another zone first. Retiring is also reversible: Restore puts the entry back in the pickers as if it never left. Deleting would force a choice between losing history and keeping clutter; retiring avoids both.