--- title: "Tour Planning: the days ahead, one grid" url: https://tourcockpit.com/help/tour-planning lang: en description: "Tour Planning is the bird's-eye view of the days ahead: every published tour as a row, the week or the month as columns, and each cell showing how full that departure is. It is where you decide which tours run on which days, a whole week or a whole month at once, instead of adding them one day at a time on the board." --- # Tour Planning: the days ahead, one grid Tour Planning is the bird's-eye view of the days ahead: every published tour as a row, the week or the month as columns, and each cell showing how full that departure is. It is where you decide which tours run on which days, a whole week or a whole month at once, instead of adding them one day at a time on the board. ## What is Tour Planning? A grid of the days you plan. Rows are your published tours, in alphabetical order, each with its colour dot. Columns are days: Week is Monday to Sunday and Month is the calendar month, from the first to the last day. The arrows move a week or a month at a time and Today brings you back to the one that holds today. Days before today stay on screen and can still be changed, so a day that was missed can be put right afterwards. Today's column is highlighted, Saturday and Sunday are shaded a shade darker than the weekdays from the dates at the top to the totals at the bottom, and the Pax booked row at the bottom totals every booked seat per day. Only Published tours appear here. An archived tour cannot be planned; set it back to Published on the Tours screen first. ## What does a cell show? - An empty cell with a faint + means the tour does not run that day. - A dashed cell reading 0/8 is a planned departure with no bookings yet: the day is on, seats are waiting. - A tinted cell reads booked over seats, 3/8, and the tint tells the load at a glance: green when comfortable, amber when three quarters full, red when full. In week view a full day also carries the Full badge. - A day that runs more than one vehicle reads its mix above the seats: 2×8 + 19 over 5/35 is two 8-seat vans and a 19-seat bus, rolled up into one cell. ## How do I put a tour on a day? 1. Tap the empty cell where the tour's row meets the day. The cell becomes a planned departure, 0/8. 2. To plan a whole span, press on the first day and drag along the row; every empty day in the sweep is planned at once. Once you have applied a vehicle mix, the drag plants the last mix you applied on every empty day it crosses, so a week of two vans and the bus is one sweep. A sweep is planned whole or not at all: when one of its days cannot take the mix, for example because it would take away a departure that already has bookings, nothing is planned on any day and the message names that day. 3. The small + in a planned cell's corner adds one more departure at the smallest size, the fastest way to a second van. Planning a day is creating that day's departure: the moment a cell is planned, the Daily Board for that date carries the tour as a block, crew and vehicle still unassigned. There is no separate publish step. ## How do I plan two vans and a bus on one day? Tap a planned day. The vehicle mix opens over the cell (from the bottom of the screen on a phone): one row per vehicle size your fleet has, with a counter on each. Set how many of each you want, or tap one of the mixes under Often, and press Apply. Often holds the mixes your company plans most, and from the first day it always offers one of each of your two smallest sizes and two of the smallest with one of the next: with vans of 8 and a bus of 19, that is 8 + 19 and 2×8 + 19. The day then runs exactly that: missing departures are planted, extra empty ones are taken away, and all of them are linked into one convoy on the Daily Board. Apply is refused outright, with nothing changed, when that convoy would leave a booking with nobody in it who speaks its language: that happens when a departure still without a guide, holding a booking in a language the day's other guides do not speak, would be linked to them. Give it a guide who speaks it first. Remove takes the whole day away. The sizes are simply the seat counts of your vehicles in Reference Data, so adding a bigger bus there gives the mix a new row by itself. A departure that has bookings, or a vehicle or crew already set on the board, is never taken away from here: its row cannot go below it, and says why. The planned sizes are placeholders, not assignments: when the board gets a real vehicle on a departure, that vehicle's seats replace the planned number. ## Can one guide do two tours on the same day? Yes, when the tours share the day politely. Every tour occupies a slot: morning, afternoon, or the full day. A morning tour and an afternoon tour can share the same guide or the same van, one after the other. A full-day tour occupies the whole day, so it can share nothing, and two tours in the same slot clash the same way. The grid never refuses a plan over the crew, because planning assigns no people: you can happily run two full-day tours on one day with two crews. That rule bites on the Daily Board, at the moment you give both departures the same GUIA or the same FURGO; the board explains exactly which tour already holds them. The one plan the grid does refuse is the one described above, where linking the day's departures into a convoy would leave a booking with nobody who speaks its language. ## How does planning reach the Daily Board? Directly: a planned cell and a board block are the same departure seen from two screens. Bookings entered on the board fill the cell's count here; the vehicle mix of every planned day carries Open the board, to that date on the Daily Board, ready to work the day. A departure is taken away only while it is empty; once bookings exist, it is managed on the board. Everyone in the office plans a tour onto an empty day, sets its vehicle mix, adds a second departure and takes an empty one away. An operator never sees this grid.