Getting Authors There
Alan Mathieson, CTO - 10 June 2026 Series: Building the Backbone
Ask any festival organiser what actually keeps them up at night and it's rarely the programme. It's the logistics. The car that didn't turn up. The author and their partner given two rooms when they wanted one. The driver who didn't know which terminal. This is where festivals live or die on the day, and until this release, it was the part of Planner that still had gaps.
June closed them. The travel and accommodation workflow now runs joined-up from end to end (Logistics Schedule, then Pick-ups, then Driver Schedule), with room sharing threaded through it all.
Couples Share a Room, and the Maths Finally Works
Authors are often married to other authors, or to their publicists. It happens constantly, and it used to quietly break the numbers: two people, two stays, two rooms counted, and a false "over capacity" warning on a hotel that was actually fine.
Room sharing fixes it. Open either person's stay and set Sharing With to the other. Both of them see "Sharing with…" on their My Accommodation page, publicists see it on their authors' view, and, the important bit, the Accommodation Checker now counts the pair as one room, not two. No more phantom over-bookings, no more manual mental arithmetic to reconcile the count.
A Driver Schedule You Can Drag
Assigning pick-ups used to mean holding the whole jigsaw in your head. Now there's a proper Driver Schedule: one column per driver plus an Unassigned column, with every pick-up run laid out by time across each festival day. Drag a run onto a driver to assign it. That's it.
There's one switch that matters, Assign only, on by default, which means dragging a run onto a driver keeps the pick-up time exactly as you planned it in the Logistics Schedule. Turn it off only when you genuinely need to move a time as well. It's a small guardrail that stops an assignment accidentally becoming a reschedule.
Behind it sits the Pick-ups master sheet, the raw table of runs. Edit them directly, see passengers at a glance, and use CSV export/import for mass assignment: export the runs, fill in the drivers in a spreadsheet, reimport. For a festival with fifty pick-ups across a weekend, that's the difference between an afternoon and ten minutes.
The Details That Save the Day
Logistics is a game of small things going right. A handful that shipped alongside:
Book Tickets, one click away. Events with a box-office link now show a prominent Book Tickets button across the Event Listing, My Events and Social Media Images, with a copy button right next to it that puts the link on your clipboard, ready to paste into a post or an email.
The driver's number, on the day. My Travel and My Authors' Travel now show the driver's mobile alongside their name, tappable to call. When a plan wobbles at 7am, the person and the number are on the same screen.
Tidy-up that respects your work. Mark someone as "Not Needed" and Planner now offers to clean up any placeholder "Awaiting Details" entries you'd created, so they don't linger in the Travel sheet. And the language softened everywhere: empty travel and accommodation states now read "assistance not required" in neutral grey, instead of amber warnings implying something's broken.
Why This Completes the Picture
Back in February I wrote that we were building a data layer for festivals. Logistics is where that abstract idea meets a cold car park at dawn. A shared room has to reduce the count. A dragged run has to keep its time. A driver's number has to be one tap from the author who's waiting.
Getting people to a festival and looking after them while they're there is the hardest, least forgiving part of the job. As of this release, Planner handles it end to end, from the first offer to the pick-up at the gate.
Fesutibaru is building the digital backbone of live culture, starting with book festivals. If logistics is your nightmare, let us show you the other way. Book a demo or get in touch at info@fesutibaru.com.