Platform updates October 2026

On a tour booked by request, the traveller's card is now held when they ask, and accepting the request takes the payment. Decline it, or let the deadline pass, and the hold is released: there was never a payment. An accepted booking that nobody paid for cannot happen any more. One consequence: you decide on a request from the dates, the group size and the traveller's message, and the answers to your booking questions, a phone number say, arrive with the paid booking, in the dashboard and by email.

Signing in lands you on the dashboard, and the dashboard starts with your next tour and with what is waiting on you. Under it, the next two weeks, an earnings band, and your tours with their cover photos. A Share your tours button links to your public page, and the walkthrough is one click away for anyone who wants a tour of the tool.

A search box sits in the dashboard header and at the top of the tour editor. Type what you call the thing, cut-off, notice, last minute, cancellation, and pick the suggestion: you land on the setting, which lights up for a moment, even when it is hidden until another option is chosen. When your words match nothing, an assistant reads the list of settings and offers its best guess.

From the bookings list, the calendar's day panel or Today's departures, Message everyone writes to every traveller booked on a departure at once: the meeting point changed, you are running late, the weather, how to find you. Four quick starts put editable words in the box. It is offered while someone is booked and until three days after the start, and it says before sending who would be skipped and why. There is no automatic translation: the message goes out in the words you write.

Conversations with travellers read as a chat now: bubbles, the booking pinned at the top, and a box that grows as you type.

• Improve with AI, on a trip request. Write your idea for the day in two sentences and press the button. You get a short pitch and a plan, one step a line, and the included and not-included lists are filled only if they are empty. Nothing is sent until you press Send proposal, and Undo brings your own words back.
• Make it shorter, on listing text. Under the tour description and under each itinerary stop. It cuts your text to a readable length, never below what a listing needs, and Undo puts the original back. It saves nothing until you save the step.

Tour cards show the guide's photo and name, and the tour page shows "Your guide" near the top, with your photo, your name and your stars, before the price. A card without a photo of you now stands out, so if you have not added one yet, this is the month to do it. Stars appear on a card from the third review; until then a card shows no rating rather than one review's.

The home page and the Guide with us page show the guides who joined most recently, with a count of the guides, the cities and the languages on the platform. A guide appears there once they have a photo and a published tour, newest first, and what anyone earns plays no part.

• Your Stripe account, from the dashboard. A link opens the Stripe account your payouts come from. You are asked for your password first.
• The pricing step shows the money. When you set a price, a card shows what you keep and what the platform cost is, and reminds you that publishing a tour and being listed each month cost nothing.

Guides can now sign up from every country, except a handful under sanctions. Where card payouts are not possible, the guide takes payment in person, as any guide may since September.

The app is in open testing on Google Play. It is the site, signed in once and in your pocket. The badge in the footer takes you to it.

• Report a problem, in the footer, opens the contact form with the page you were on already filled in.
• In the calendar, open slots wear the green and days away stay grey.
• The Guide with us page was rebuilt: how it works, what you earn, the tools. It is the page to send a colleague.
• Our story, the letter about why this exists, is a page of its own now.

Updates like this one appear in the Journal each month. The help centre has the longer answers, and the contact form reaches us for anything it does not cover.