Languages, notification levels and guardians
Four per-traveller settings decide what an individual receives and in what language. The notification level, email copies and guardians are all on the traveller's row on the trip; language is the odd one out, and is explained first.
Language
Language is chosen when you add someone to a trip: Español or English. If you picked an existing contact, their language comes with them.
Every automatic message and every answer follows it. If a traveller writes in a different language, the concierge mirrors them for that reply, but the scheduled messages stay in the language on the record.
Changing it afterwards has a catch. The language on the contact profile page applies to trips you add them to from then on; the traveller record on a trip they are already on keeps the language copied at add time. The console traveller row has no language selector, so correcting a live trip is done through the MCP tools (concierge_update_traveler) or by removing and re-adding the traveller.
Notification levels
Each traveller has a level that governs how much proactive messaging they get:
- all — everything, including the daily brief. This is the default.
- important — reminders and alerts only. No daily briefs, no segment nudges, no post-trip feedback ask, no birthday or rebooking messages.
- critical — only urgent alerts.
The floors are fixed per message type. Flight alerts are the only critical kind, and the only thing that will reach a traveller at 3am — a cancellation is worth waking up for, because rebooking is a race. Severe-weather alerts, check-in reminders, the pre-trip checklist, departure countdowns, checkout reminders, connection information, advisories, payment reminders, passport warnings and document chasing are important. Daily briefs, segment reminders, the feedback ask, birthday greetings and rebooking messages are all.
The full schedule is in What the concierge sends, and when.
Who sets it
Either of you. The traveller can say it in their own conversation — something like "no more daily messages" — and the assistant saves it and confirms.
In the console, open the trip, find the traveller's row and press Notifications. Message level holds the three levels above, worded as Everything, including daily briefs, Reminders and alerts only and Urgent alerts only. The change saves as soon as you pick it.
Email copies
The same Notifications panel has Email copy, which decides whether that traveller also gets proactive messages by email:
- Follow the agency setting — the default, and what everyone gets until you say otherwise.
- Always send a copy — email as well as chat, every time.
- Never send email — chat only, even when the agency default is to send email. Use this when someone asks you to stop emailing them but wants to stay on the trip.
The agency-wide default lives in Settings and is the one to change if this is about all your travellers rather than one of them. Under its "fallback" setting an email is sent only when the chat message did not land — which is what happens on WhatsApp more than 24 hours after the traveller last wrote.
A traveller with no email address on record cannot be emailed whatever you pick here, and the panel says so. Removing the address is the other way to stop email: clear the Email field on their contact and it clears on their trips too, as long as the trip still held the same address.
Quiet hours are separate
Quiet hours hold every non-critical message for every traveller, in the traveller's local timezone, not yours.
They are on by default: 22:00 to 08:00. You do not have to configure anything for a traveller to be left alone overnight. Set your own window in settings if those hours are wrong for your trips; to switch quiet hours off entirely, set the start and end to the same hour.
A held message is not lost. It is offered again on the next cycle and arrives at the first civil hour — so a storm forecast that the system notices at 02:00 reaches the traveller with breakfast, while the day is still ahead of them.
Quiet hours stack with the traveller's own level: a message has to pass both. Flight alerts, being critical, ignore quiet hours.
Guardians
A guardian is a contact — typically a parent — attached to a traveller, usually a minor, so that they stay informed without being on the trip.
How it behaves:
- The guardian receives that traveller's important and critical messages on their own chat.
- Each one is prefixed with the child's first name, in the guardian's own language, so a parent with two children on the trip can tell them apart.
- Guardians do not receive all-level messages. No daily briefs, no birthday greetings.
- A guardian only receives anything if that contact has activated the assistant themselves. A guardian who has never connected gets nothing, silently. Send them an invite the same way you would a traveller — see Invite links and how travellers connect.
- Delivery to a guardian is best effort. A failure never stops the message reaching the traveller.
Guardians are set from the traveller's row on the trip, under Guardians: tick the contacts who should receive their messages. They can also be set through the MCP tools, on concierge_update_traveler, by passing the contact ids; passing an empty list clears them. The group manifest reports how many guardians each traveller has, which is the quickest way to check a school trip is fully covered before departure.
Guardians are a copy of the traveller's messages, not a substitute for them. The traveller still receives everything their own level allows.
Related
- Groups, leaders and rooming — for chaperones and per-group leaders, which is a different mechanism
- Adding travellers and reusing contacts
- Data, security and what we store