Admin Invites, Place Details, and Real Link Previews

Three things changed in Digital Guidebooks this week. Each one came from operator requests, and each one removes friction from a job that was harder than it should have been: bringing a second person into your account without handing over the keys, giving guests the practical details they need to act on a recommendation, and sharing a guidebook in iMessage without it looking like a broken link.

Add a Second Administrator

Operators on every paid plan can now invite a second administrator from Settings → Team. The flow is one field: enter an email address, and the invited person receives a magic link to sign in. Once they accept, they can edit guidebooks, manage guides, view analytics, and run the day-to-day side of the account.

What they cannot do, by design, is touch billing or the danger zone. Those sections are blurred out for non-owner admins, reserved for the person whose card is on file. So you can bring on an operations manager, a head guide, or a co-founder without worrying about subscription changes or account deletions being one click away for someone who should not have that authority.

The companion feature is Make Admin, on every guide row in the same Team panel. Click it, and that guide is promoted to administrator while keeping their guide profile, code, payment links, and full historical analytics. They appear in both the Administrators and Guides lists, continue to show up in tip and review leaderboards, and do not count against your guide seat limit. The most common use is your head guide, the one who already takes on extra responsibility but did not have admin tools to back it up.

Show Price, Hours, and Tags on Every Place

Every stop and every local place in a guidebook gained three new fields: a price tier ($, $$, $$$), hours of operation, and free-form tags. Price and hours render as a clean meta row above the place description — something like "$$ · 11am to 10pm" — and tags appear as chips guests can scan at a glance.

The reason these matter: most of the questions a guest has about a recommended spot are practical. Is it cheap or fancy? Are they open right now? Is it vegetarian-friendly? Operators were answering those in description text or sending guests off-platform to look them up. Now the answers live where the guest is already looking.

Tags are deliberately free-form. The most common operator uses we have seen so far are dietary attributes (vegetarian-friendly, gluten-free options), group fit (dog-friendly, family-style, romantic), and vibe (lively, quiet, dive). The format does not force operators into a fixed taxonomy, which is what we tried in an earlier iteration and what every food tour operator told us was wrong.

Share a Guidebook and the Preview Actually Shows Up

Until this release, sharing a guidebook URL in iMessage, Slack, or Facebook Messenger produced a sad-looking preview. Sometimes a blank rectangle, sometimes the bare URL, occasionally nothing at all. The reason: most link previewers do not run JavaScript, and Digital Guidebooks generated its preview metadata in the browser. The previewer saw the page before the title, description, and cover image had loaded.

The fix is a server-side edge function that injects the right metadata into the HTML before the page reaches the previewer. Now when a guest, a guide, or an operator shares a guidebook link, the recipient sees the tour title, the experience description, and the cover photo, the same way they would for a Spotify song or a news article. This is the single biggest reduction in sharing friction the product has shipped.

Smaller Wins in This Release

A handful of other improvements landed alongside the three headline features:

• Inline branded buttons in any tourist body text via a shortcode. Type [btn Reserve|https://example.com] in a description field and it renders as a button styled with the guidebook's secondary color.
• Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and X buttons now render on public stop pages. The data was being saved but only Website and Instagram had been displaying.
• Tourist guide selection persists across tab close. If a guest picks a guide on a multi-guide tour, the selection now survives them closing and reopening the tab, matching the 24-hour access token lifetime.
• Login captcha hardening. Real users were occasionally hitting a "verification expired" error caused by stale Turnstile tokens. The widget now resets after every submit and shows a friendlier message when it does happen.
• Cross-org place isolation. Tourist-side reads on places and placements are now scoped through a server-side function that enforces organization boundaries, regardless of how a URL is constructed.

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