Buses, planes, subway stations and hotel basements all lose signal. The Trip Binder phone app is built to keep working there. The website needs a connection.
Before you leave: open the trip once
The phone saves a trip the first time it opens it with a connection. If you open a trip for the first time with no signal, you will see Connect once to load this trip — after that it works offline.
So before departure, have every chaperone open the trip in the app while on Wi-Fi. Leave it open for a minute so it can finish saving traveler details and photos in the background.
What you can see with no signal
- The roster, with traveler photos.
- Each traveler's details for trip staff, including emergency contacts and health information.
- The schedule, travel days, announcements and key contacts.
- Buses, groups, hotels and rooms.
- Attendance, checkpoints and count-off results.
- For staff, inventory and luggage tag codes, so bag scanning still works.
What you see is the last version the phone saved. A small line shows when it was last updated.
What you can do with no signal
These changes are saved on the phone right away and sent when you reconnect, even if you close the app in between:
- Marking attendance, one traveler or many at once
- Bus count-off results
- Room checks
- Scanning bags in and out
- Sending chat messages
While you are offline, a strip at the top says Offline — changes save and sync when you reconnect and counts what is waiting. When signal returns it shows Syncing… and then disappears. If two chaperones marked the same traveler, the newest mark wins.
Anything else — posting announcements, editing the roster or schedule, uploading photos or documents, changing settings — needs a connection.
Documents on the phone
In Documents, tap the download button next to a file to keep it on the phone. Saved files open with no signal. For trip staff, smaller files are also saved automatically on Wi-Fi from a week before the trip. Saved copies are removed a week after the trip comes home. On Android, PDFs cannot yet be opened offline inside the app, so open them once while connected and save them with your viewer's Download. See Trip documents and family files.
Privacy
Saved files and photos are stored encrypted on the phone. Signing out removes the saved trip data from that phone.
If something looks out of date
Pull down to refresh once you have signal. If a change you made offline does not appear for others, keep the app open on a good connection until the top strip disappears.
Setting up a big trip? See 10 things to set up before a band trip.