Questions and answers

What is a Package, and why does it visit two venues?

A Package is one school day at the LA Waterfront, made of Legs — one Leg per venue. The catalog publishes the whole day: which venues, in which order, when the bus leaves and when it gets back.

Two venues, because a school day has room for two and the bus costs the same either way. A Leg is not separately bookable: you hold the Package Date and every Leg in it moves together. Every Package fits inside a single school day.

MISSION and FR-6. The network has already run a combined AltaSea and Los Angeles Maritime Institute day by hand; this site automates the scheduling half of something it has done before.

Does adding a second venue cost more in bus hire?

No. LAUSD bills the hours a bus is held, not the number of stops it makes, so a day at two venues costs the same bus as a day at one. A full window is about $325 at $65 an hour, booked at least 15 school days ahead.

A school outside LAUSD hires a charter instead, and charter hire is quoted as a band rather than a rate. Either way the bus is the same bus. A second venue can still carry its own fee — the Package page says what each Leg costs and who invoices for it.

LAUSD’s published field-trip transportation rates. Billing by hours held rather than by stops is the reason a two-venue day is affordable at all, and it is the reason this catalog pairs venues.

How far in advance do I have to book?

A Package Date stops accepting bookings 30 days before the trip. That is the floor this site enforces, and it is LAUSD’s own filing deadline for an in-state field trip.

Plan on about 6 weeks. Once nurse conferral, cafeteria lead times and the bus rate ladder are counted, that is what the paperwork actually takes — but the site will not refuse a booking at 30 days, because LAUSD would not.

LAUSD field-trip policy sets the floor this site enforces. The district paperwork chain is where the longer number in the copy comes from; enforcing the longer one would refuse bookings LAUSD itself would accept.

What happens after I hold a Package Date?

Straight away: a Booking Reference on screen and a printable itinerary, the same minute. That is the thing you can put on a purchase order, and it is why this site exists.

Then each venue on the Package is notified, and this site records a Delivery Receipt for each Leg. A Delivery Receipt is proof that the message was transmitted — nothing more. No venue has agreed to anything at that point. A Venue Acknowledgement is the venue’s own decision about your group, and this site never receives one.

Each venue runs its own intake and contacts you directly. If a week goes by with no word from one of them, contact that venue yourself and quote your Booking Reference.

MISSION invariant 6. A Delivery Receipt is proof of transmission and a Venue Acknowledgement is a decision; collapsing the two is what puts a school on a bus to a venue that never agreed to host it.

Why does a Package say “Not Published” where a price should be?

Because nobody stated one. Not Published is a fact about what has been said: it does not mean free, it does not mean zero, and it does not mean the price went missing from our records.

Only one of the five venues publishes a field-trip price at all. Where a venue has stated a fee, the Package page shows it and says who invoices for it. Where a venue has not, the page says Not Published and you will learn the fee from that venue directly.

A survey of all five venues’ published materials found a field-trip price at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium and nowhere else. A site that filled that gap with a zero would be telling schools a fee-bearing day is free.

Who invoices, and how does the school pay?

The venue invoices the school directly, on its own terms, for its own Leg. This site takes no money and moves none: there is no payment page in it, no card field, and no charge column in its database.

That is a design decision, not a missing feature. Keeping money out of the portal is most of what keeps it small enough to check, and it leaves each venue’s own finance office in charge of its own billing.

MISSION invariant 2 and PRD N1 — no payment path, ever. The build fails on a payment dependency, so this is enforced rather than promised.

What do you store about my students?

Nothing. There is no field on this site capable of holding a student’s name, a roster, an age, a medical note or a dietary note — and no free-text box that could be used as one. The booking form asks for the school, a contact for the day, and how many people are coming.

A venue’s own intake may well ask for more, on its own form. That is between the school and that venue: this site does not pre-fill it, does not send it, and never sees what you put in it.

MISSION invariant 1 and PRD N2–N4. Every change is checked for a column, form field or API parameter capable of holding student data, and one fails the build.

Can I cancel?

Yes, up to the booking cutoff — 30 days before the trip — using the cancellation link that comes with your Booking Reference. It is a one-off link and not an account: this site holds no password, because a stored credential is a thing it deliberately does not have.

Every Leg returns together. There is no way to cancel one venue and keep the other — the Legs of a Package move as one, and a half-cancelled day is a school arriving somewhere with half a programme.

Inside the cutoff, contact the network and a person handles it by hand. By then a bus, a purchase order and permission slips are in flight and somebody should be looking at it. The network has not yet set its own cancellation policy; this is what the site does today.

Q9 is open — nobody at the network has decided this yet. The mechanism above is the proposal recorded in this project’s own decision notes: self-serve to the cutoff by opaque link, by hand inside it, and every Leg returning together. It is safe to build on because every policy the network might choose runs through it.