Years before my own wedding, I stood in a hotel lobby in a floor-length dress, holding a clutch and a phone that was about to die, and watched my friend’s mother call the shuttle company for the seventh time. Voicemail, every time.
The bus was 40 minutes late and nobody knew where it was. We were a small clump of guests pretending not to panic while the mother of the bride looked up taxi numbers with her thumb shaking a little. When the bus did turn up, it came from the other hotel. The driver had been told to start there, nobody had told the guests, and he had been parked outside it the whole time waiting for people who were standing in our lobby.
My best friend Ana gets married next month. I volunteered to handle the shuttles before she had finished the sentence, and her fiancé looked very relieved.
The spreadsheet I’m not making again
I should admit what I did at my own wedding first. Over about a month I built a shared Google Sheet with tabs, conditional formatting, a column for shuttle times, a column for the point person at each hotel, and a tab called “Contingencies” that I am still proud of in a sad way. I sent it to my parents, my in-laws, my maid of honor and our coordinator with a paragraph of instructions at the top.
Nobody opened it.
On the morning itself my mother-in-law texted my husband to ask if the shuttle was on time, and he answered by walking out to the road and looking. (He was right, for the record. It was coming round the bend.)
Where Ana’s day could slip
This time the planning lives in a notes app, and only one person besides me has to understand it. Ana has guests at two hotels and a single minibus from a local company. It does a run from each hotel before the ceremony, then goes back and forth late into the evening. Last Sunday I sat down and went through it pickup by pickup, asking what happens at each stop if something runs late. My husband brought me tea twice.
The first chain is the one from that lobby. If the bus leaves the first hotel late, the second hotel has no way of knowing, so people start calling. Some of them will try the bus company, whose office can only reach the driver by phone while he’s driving. Others will call Ana, who will be getting her hair done and should not be anyone’s first call. Whoever is waiting at the second hotel needs to see the bus without asking anyone. (Ana’s aunt will call me anyway. I have made peace with this.)
I asked the company whether guests could see where the bus was without downloading anything. The woman on the phone was nice about it, but no. They have a tracker for their own office and that’s all. I did get the driver’s mobile number out of her, in case the office goes to voicemail on the day.
So somebody on the bus has to carry the location. The driver was the obvious choice, and I dropped the idea quickly, because I’m not asking a man I’ve never met to install an app and sign in on his work phone on the morning of someone else’s wedding. Ana’s cousin Filip is staying at the first hotel and riding the morning run anyway. He has an Android phone, and now he has a job.
Then the chain gets longer. If Filip’s phone dies, the map shows “no signal” next to his name, which at least points people at the phone before they start imagining a ditch. Should he get off at the venue and stay there, his dot stays at the venue too, and anyone waiting for an evening run is watching a man at the bar. For the evening I’ll need a second rider, probably a groomsman who isn’t drinking, and I haven’t asked him yet.
I also asked the company what happens if the bus doesn’t come at all. They said they’d send another vehicle as soon as possible, which is not a time. My fallback is two groomsmen with cars who have agreed to stay sober until after the ceremony, and each of them knows which hotel is his.
What the guests actually get
On the morning, a link to the live view goes into the wedding WhatsApp group, and anyone who taps it gets a map in their browser with a dot labelled with Filip’s first name. Nobody installs anything or makes an account. The page has no way to send him a message either, which is good, because otherwise he would spend the ride answering “are you close” from people standing in a lobby. Filip does have to be signed in to the app on his side. You sign in with a Google account that’s already on the phone, so there’s nothing to type, but I’d still rather he did it on Friday night than in a hotel corridor in a suit.
If you’ve read me before, you know I have opinions about the “where are you” call in any group. A wedding shuttle is the formalwear version of it.
The test drive to the supermarket
Last Thursday I used Share my drive on a trip to the supermarket and back, with my sister watching from her laptop, purely to see what the page looks like. (She asked why. I didn’t have a good answer.) Reading the details afterwards, I found that a shared drive with no destination stops after four hours. Ana’s shuttle day runs from late morning to past midnight.
So the plan changed. I’ll start a trip for the day, Filip joins it with the code, and one of us shares the live view link that guests open in a browser from the trip itself (tap the trip at the top of the map, then “Share live view”). That link keeps going until the trip ends, and I set the trip to last a day. I’m leaving the trip’s destination empty, because a trip with a destination finishes once everyone in it has arrived, and if Filip and I both reach the venue the link would end with us. Without a destination the page shows no arrival time, only the dot. I can live with that. The other catch is that viewers see everyone in the trip, so the guests will also get a dot for me, sitting at a table, not moving.
I’ve also bought Filip an Anker power bank. He didn’t ask for it.
My friend’s mother, the one who made the seventh call, is coming to Ana’s wedding. I’ve already added her to the WhatsApp group.