The gravel lot behind the last winery of the day smelled like hot dust and spilled Pinot, and I was standing in the middle of it with a plastic cup in my hand, trying to work out which of the white minibuses along the fence was ours. From where I stood they all looked identical, engines off, windows tinted, drivers off somewhere in the shade. Behind me a woman from our group was asking the tasting room host whether the bus had left without us, and the host, who had clearly heard that question every afternoon of her working life, smiled and said she honestly couldn’t say. It was the Willamette Valley in late September, the light going low and orange over the vines, and there was a wasp circling the rim of my cup.
Nobody had actually told us anything wrong, to be fair to her. The guide had said a pickup time at the first stop, and by the afternoon, after enough tastings, that time had gone soft in everyone’s head. Some of us remembered it one way, some the other, and a couple from Portland was sure the pickup was out front by the road. You could feel the mood in the lot tip from relaxed to faintly nervous, people checking their phones for a message that wasn’t coming.
I have been the guest on enough wine and brewery days since then to know the last hour of nearly every one of them goes like this.
Watching the bus from a picnic table
The tour where it went differently was a brewery afternoon in Asheville the next spring. Before we pulled out of the hotel, our guide, Keisha, sent a link into the group text she had set up with all of us that morning, and said something like “that’s me, the bus goes where I go.” I tapped it on the sticky bench outside the first taproom, half expecting an app store page. A map opened right there in my phone’s browser instead, with a dot labelled Keisha sitting in the lot across the street. I didn’t sign in to anything or download anything, and I couldn’t see anything about the other guests either. All it showed was her dot on a street map of the neighborhood, creeping nowhere for the moment.
Most of the afternoon I forgot it was there. Every so often, standing in a loud room with the smell of wet hops and fryer oil hanging over everything, somebody in our group would pull it up, see that Keisha’s dot hadn’t moved, and go back to their flight. Once the dot started creeping toward the exit of the lot, people drifted out on their own without being rounded up.
What I noticed from the passenger seat, if a bench in a converted shuttle counts, was how much of a guide’s day goes into answering that same question. There’s a longer piece on why tour operators struggle to answer it, which I read later on the shuttle back to the hotel.
Setting it up, if you run the tours
After that trip I asked Keisha how she did it, partly because I’m nosy and partly because I wanted to know whether it was some expensive company system. She laughed and told me it’s the live view link from Konvoyage, made on her own phone, and the person who makes it has to be on the bus, because the dot the guests watch is that person’s phone moving down the road with them.
Whoever does it needs Android and the app, and has to sign in with Google first. That part is quick, you tap sign in and pick the Google account that’s already on the phone, nothing to type. Usually it makes more sense for the guide to do this than the driver, since the driver has a bus to drive and shouldn’t be poking at a screen in a winery lot.
For a single bus, Keisha uses the simplest version. In the app you tap the plus button and choose Share my drive, give it a name, and there’s an optional box asking where you’re headed. Then you hit Start sharing and Android’s normal share sheet pops up, so you can drop the link into whatever thread your guests are already in, like a group text or the confirmation email you send the night before. The catch she warned me about is the destination box. If you fill it in with the first stop, the sharing ends as soon as the bus arrives there, which is great for an airport run and useless for a day of hopping between taprooms. Leaving it empty keeps it going, but then it switches itself off after a few hours, so on a long day she checks it after lunch and, if it has stopped, starts a fresh one and sends the new link round to the group.
When there’s more than one person or vehicle involved, she does it as a trip instead. She creates the trip, the other driver or guide joins with the trip code, and then anyone in the trip can tap the trip pill at the top of the map and choose Share live view. The difference for your guests is that they see everyone in the trip on that page, each as a dot with their first name on it. That’s handy with several minibuses, as long as you tell people whose name belongs to which bus. It gets confusing if both the driver and the guide on the same bus join, because you end up with dots stacked on top of each other, and if someone back at the office joins, their dot just sits at the office all day.
If the trip or the drive has a destination set, guests see an arrival time as a clock time, something like “arrives 4:15”, which is easier to read with a glass in your hand than a countdown. They don’t see speed. If the phone on the bus loses signal in a valley, its dot is marked “no signal” instead of quietly freezing, which I found reassuring when we went through a dead patch outside town.
Guests can’t do anything on that page except look. They can’t message the bus or join the trip, and the group chat and trip code stay hidden from them. The page isn’t picked up by search engines either. A real limit worth knowing about if you run full-size coaches is that only about twenty people can have the page open per trip, so on a big tour it’s better to share it with group leaders than to expect every single guest to keep it open.
When the day is over, the trip stops sharing when you end it or when the trip length you picked runs out, and anyone in the trip can tap Stop live view to shut off every link at once. After a trip ends, the page offers a replay of the route for a while, which a few people on our tour used to figure out the name of the brewery where they’d liked the sour.
Keisha’s advice was to try the whole thing on a quiet day first with a friend watching from home, so you see what guests will see before you rely on it. The app itself is on the Konvoyage site if you want a look before that test run.
For companies with more than one guide
Some of the operators I’ve ridden with have a whole roster of guides and drivers out on different routes on a Saturday, and keeping track of where those people are is its own job. That’s the side Konvoyage for Business is built around, showing a team’s live location and arrival times so the office knows who is where.
The laundromat
At the last brewery in Asheville, the lot was full when we arrived, so the driver dropped us at the door and went off to find somewhere to wait. A long while and a lot of stout later, our group stood on the sidewalk looking up and down the street for the shuttle, and it wasn’t anywhere. A retired dentist from Ohio named Gary, who had been very quiet all day, pulled up the link, turned his phone sideways, and said “she’s by a laundromat.” Then he set off down the hill with the phone held out in front of him like a divining rod, and we all followed him in a slightly wobbly line past a tattoo shop and a closed bakery, until we turned the corner and there was the shuttle, engine running, Keisha in the front seat eating a burrito with the door open.
Gary got a round of applause, and he sat in the front for the drive back.