When a leader sets a trip to 'private' status, turn off visibility to leaders
Sometimes a committee administrator has time to create multiple listings in advance on behalf of leaders but doesn't want them to be visible to anyone until the trip opens for registration, so they set them to 'private' for a few days or weeks. Particularly the case for Global Adventures but also for some course field trips. However right now all listings are visible to any leader even when marked private. The whole point of marking something private is so that no one gets the advantage of advance visibility for that activity. Can we make any 'private' status activity be invisible to anyone except critical staff or committee admins?
We allow leaders to see private activities because they need to see all activities at a given route/place to prevent multiple groups going to the same place. This obviously applies mostly to global adventures and we understand the need to have limited visibility but it’s hard to justify the resources needed for development for a specific activity committee at this time.
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David Bradley commented
One thing to keep in mind is that even private listings block the route from being used by other trip leaders and course leaders. For them it's useful (some might say even necessary) to be able to see if there are any upcoming listings for a route before they themselves decide whether to lead a trip there.
Presumably, if private trips were to be made invisible to other leaders, the leaders would still be notified of a schedule conflict when they tried to schedule another activity, yes? But it would be frustrating for a leader to be find out about a schedule conflict so late in the route-selection process.
For both courses and trips it's useful to know if there is already another activity scheduled on the same route and the same day. For trips it's also useful to know if there is already an activity scheduled on a nearby date, so that trip leaders don't accidentally schedule trips to the same place on nearby dates (unless they want to, of course).