Crew travel, tracked person by person
When you collect travel for an event, each person carries their own employment status, position, on-site supervisor, airfare and ground transport — alongside their flights, their arrival instructions and their ride code. Two people in one room can differ on every one of them.
Staff travel tracking keeps each person’s flights, ground transport and employment details on the same record as their room. In Blocks those details belong to the person, not the room, so two roommates can differ on every field — and one roster exports every traveller with a column per night showing who is in a bed when.
“Two of my crew share a room — one is a full-time employee we are flying in, the other is a vendor driving his own car. My spreadsheet has one row for the room.”
Staff details belong to the person, not the room. Each occupant carries their own employment status, position, on-site supervisor, airfare and ground transport, and a “Same as” button copies the first person’s answers into the next slot only when somebody chooses to.
“Half the crew is in rentals and a few need flights but no room at all, so my pickup number is fiction.”
Mark a property as a rental or as no lodging and pickup reads hotels only. Rental nights and travel-only people get their own line instead of quietly dragging a hotel percentage down.
“The production manager wants a head count for every single night, and I rebuild that grid by hand every year.”
The Staff Master roster exports one row per person with a column for each night of the event carrying a 1 or a 0. Sum a column and you have that night’s head count.
“I cannot tell you which of the people we promised a flight still has no flight booked.”
One chip on the guest list — Airfare · no flights — selects exactly the rooms where somebody was marked as flying and no flight number exists yet, then arms the send so you can ask all of them at once.
How do you track staff and crew travel alongside hotel rooms?
Travel sits on the reservation, not in a second spreadsheet. When you collect travel for an event, each person on the block carries their flights and times, their arrival airport, how they are getting around on the ground, a contact number, the ticket cost, and their per-diem dates — beside the nights they are staying, on the same record as the room. Collecting travel is a per-event choice, and it comes in three groups you turn on independently: staff details (employment status, position, on-site supervisor), flights, and ground transport. All three are off until you switch them on, and a department can be narrowed further than the event — so a production crew can be asked for everything while a sponsor group is asked for nothing. Because there is one record per person rather than a rooming list and a travel sheet that have to agree, the person whose room moved yesterday is the same person whose arrival time you are reading today. Nothing has to be reconciled, because nothing was ever kept twice.
Can two people in the same room have different travel details?
Yes — and that is the whole design. Five details describe a person rather than a room: employment status, position or title, on-site supervisor, whether airfare is provided, and ground transport (a rideshare, their own mileage, a rental car, or none). Two people sharing a king can be a full-time employee and a vendor, reporting to different leads, one flown in and one driving. Blocks asks for a set per occupant, and nothing spreads from the first person to the rest. Slots after the first get a “Same as” button carrying the first person’s name, which copies their current answers into that slot where they can still be edited — a visible copy somebody chose, never a default that happened. That matters because once a value is in the column, a copied answer is indistinguishable from a stated one. A blank field means nobody has said yet, which you can recover from; a confidently wrong answer is what you cannot. Change the room type and the slots re-clamp, clearing the names and details of any slot that drops off so a later re-expand cannot silently inherit somebody else’s answers.
Where do staff and travel details get collected?
Four places, all writing to the same record. A department lead answers for each person as they add the room in their department portal. Your own coordinators enter or correct anything on the reservation’s Travel tab. A department’s existing spreadsheet imports: Blocks reads the employment-status, position, supervisor, airfare and ground-transport columns verbatim, then maps them afterwards against your organization’s own vocabulary — so “Mileage (Personal Car)” lands as mileage and your configured “Temporary Employee” is not collapsed into somebody else’s “Temporary”. A cell it cannot place is dropped rather than guessed at, quoted back to you word for word as a warning, and the row stays selected because the rest of it is good. The fourth place is the guest themselves: on their own personal page a traveller can set their employment status and ground transport, and nothing else from that list. Position, on-site supervisor and airfare provided are never guest-editable — the hiring manager states who somebody is and how they are getting there; the traveller fills in the flights. And when a department’s sheet gives every person their own row with a roommate column naming the other, the pair collapses into a single room with two occupants — only where the room type, the dates and who pays all agree. Where they disagree, Blocks raises it instead of inventing a night nobody asked for, and where a merge does happen both people’s notes survive on the room with a badge saying so.
How do I find the people we promised a flight and never booked?
A chip on the guest list called “Airfare · no flights” selects exactly the rooms where somebody was marked as having airfare provided and both flight numbers are still empty. It is deliberately blind to where the flight came from: a coordinator typing in a flight number closes the row just as a guest entering one does, because chasing somebody for a flight they already have is the failure this list exists to prevent. The chip arms the bulk bar, so going from the filter to sending each of those people their personal link is one click, and it stays hidden entirely until somebody on the event is actually marked as flying. Ask Blocks can work the same list in words — “request travel from everyone we are flying who has not entered flights” — and the proposal tells you which filter it applied and how many rooms that removed before you confirm the send. When the flights do arrive as an itinerary, nobody re-types them: paste the text or upload the PDF or photo, and Blocks proposes the legs it found with a confidence mark on each. Ambiguous readings require an explicit “These are my flights” confirmation, and applying the itinerary only ever fills empty fields, so it cannot overwrite something a person typed.
How does a traveller know where to go when they land?
A coordinator writes arrival instructions and a ride code on each traveller’s record, and both appear on that person’s own page as a read-only “Getting there” block — on the first screen they see and again on their travel tab. Arrival instructions are free prose and keep the shape you pasted, so a shuttle note that reads “door 4 / hourly / after 11pm call” arrives looking like that rather than as one run-on line. The ride code renders as a copyable chip with a plain hint: use this code in the Lyft or Uber app for rides your coordinator covers. Travellers can enter their own arrival airport, which is the piece only they know. What they cannot do is edit the instructions or the code — there is no input for either, not even a disabled one, because an input the server would refuse is worse than no input at all. The result is that the logistics you worked out once reach every person who needs them, in the place they will actually look, without becoming another thing to answer by text at midnight.
Can I see who is in a bed on every night of the event?
That is the Staff Master roster: Event → Settings → “Staff master (CSV)”, and the last sheet of the full-event workbook. It is the one export that joins the request, the reservation and the travel record per person, so a roommate gets a row of their own rather than being a name in somebody else’s cell. Twenty-seven fixed columns cover department, the hiring manager (your department’s leader), the on-site supervisor, name and contact, employment status and title, dates, room type, roommates, special requests, airfare, flights, ground transport, arrival instructions, ride code, hotel, confirmation number and room number — and then one column for each night of the event carrying a 1 or a 0. Sum a column and you have that night’s head count, with check-in counted and check-out not, because a departure date is not a night. Somebody who has not answered yet appears with blank travel cells rather than vanishing from the roster, which is the difference between a gap you can chase and a person you forget. Two more exports come off the same data: the rideshare list for your transport vendor — everybody set to ride, each with the number their ride code goes to — and “Export emails” from the guest list, one row per person rather than per room.
What if crew are in rentals, or travelling with no room at all?
A property on an event is a hotel, a rental, or no lodging. Rentals cover the houses and apartments a crew fills up around a festival site; “no lodging” is the travel-only roster — the temps and locals who need a flight, ground transport or per-diem dates but no bed. Once a property is typed, the numbers stop lying: pickup and rooming readiness read hotels only and say so, while rental nights and travel-only people are reported on their own line rather than folded into a hotel percentage or left showing as permanently awaiting a hotel that does not exist. The things that only make sense with a hotel switch off rather than sitting there broken — sending a rooming list, processing a hotel response, checking rates, and the whole cut-off and attrition section of the block — each replaced by one plain sentence saying there is no hotel to send to. That is deliberate: a cut-off date on an Airbnb would raise an alert nobody could ever clear. On their own page, a traveller with no room reads “No hotel booked — travel only” instead of an empty stay card, while somebody in a rental sees its full name and address, because they still have to find the front door.
We bring the same crew every year — do I retype them every time?
No. Everyone your organization has hosted lives in People, searchable by name or email. Open a person and you get every event they were on, whether they were the primary guest or a roommate, the hotels and blocks they stayed in, their travel snapshot, their loyalty program and number, and whether their personal link is live. Building next year’s requests, “Add known people” multi-selects a whole crew instead of retyping them, and edits you make to a person carry forward while reservations already sent stay exactly as they went out. Because a department lead can record an email when they add somebody, a returning traveller is matched to the person you already have rather than becoming a second copy of them every season. Ask Blocks answers the same question in one line — “has Jordan Rivera worked with us before?” — and an organization admin can merge a duplicate into the record you are keeping, moving every reservation, roommate slot and travel detail across. That merge cannot be undone, so Blocks makes you say it deliberately rather than doing it for you.
Frequently asked questions
When you collect travel for an event, each person carries their own employment status, position, on-site supervisor, airfare and ground transport — alongside their flights, their arrival instructions and their ride code. Two people in one room can differ on every one of them.
What staff and travel details does Blocks track for each person?
Can two people sharing a room have different travel details?
Can a guest edit their own position or supervisor?
How do I get a head count for each night of the event?
Can Blocks track crew staying in rentals or travelling without a room?
Is travel tracking on for every event?
Have more questions? Check our glossary of terms or get in touch.
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