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Tie Availability to Your Guides

Many operators offer several activities that the same people lead: a two-hour trip, a half-day, a full-day — all run by the same small team of guides. EquipDash can tie each experience's availability to its guides, so a guide booked on one departure automatically closes their overlapping departures everywhere else. No double-bookings, no manual juggling.

How it works​

  • Guides are assigned per schedule. Assign guides to each departure from the experience's Availability tab, exactly as you do today — one at a time, or many departures at once with the bulk Assign guides action.
  • One toggle per experience. On the experience's detail page, turn on Need a guide to run? — from then on, a time slot only sells while one of its assigned guides is free.
  • A booking locks a guide in. The first booking on a departure locks one of its free guides onto it (marked with a ★ on the availability list). That guide's overlapping departures on your other experiences stop selling — customers simply see those times as unavailable.
  • More bookings on the same departure need no extra guide. A shared tour keeps selling its remaining seats with the same guide.
  • Cancelling frees the guide. When a departure's last booking is cancelled, its guide is released and the overlapping times reopen on their own.

Set it up​

  1. Open the experience's detail page and turn on Need a guide to run? (next to the schedule settings).
  2. If departures usually take more than one guide, set Guides per departure — the default for every session. A specific session can override it with its own Guides needed when you add or edit that session.
  3. On the Availability tab, make sure each departure has its guides assigned — use the bulk Assign guides action to cover many departures at once.
  4. Repeat the toggle on every experience the same guides lead.

The experience detail page's Schedule and duration card with the Need a guide to run? toggle switched on and the Guides per departure setting below it

Any one of them can lead​

Assign several guides to a departure and leave Guides per departure at 1: any one of them covers it. As bookings come in on overlapping departures, EquipDash locks a different free guide onto each — first one, then the next — and only shows a time as unavailable once nobody is left.

Choosing who leads​

EquipDash picks the least-busy free guide automatically, but you stay in charge: on the Availability tab, click a guide's chip on a booked departure to hand the lead to someone else. The ★ marks who's leading. If a slot needs more guides than it has assigned, the availability list warns you ("Needs 2 guides — 1 assigned") so you can fix it before customers hit an unavailable time.

The Availability tab's sessions table where a booked departure's guide chip shows the ★ marker for the guide leading it

Good to know​

  • Off by default. Experiences without the toggle behave exactly as before — assigning guides stays a planning aid, and double-assignment shows a heads-up instead of blocking.
  • Time off counts. A guide on approved time off isn't available to cover a departure that day.
  • Works everywhere. The booking widget, point of sale, API, marketplace channels, and Dash AI all respect the same rule — no channel can double-book a guide.
  • Guides stay private. Customers never see guide names — a gated time simply shows as unavailable.