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📖 This page is auto-mirrored from docs/user-guide/README.md on main. Please propose changes by pull request — direct wiki edits are overwritten by the next sync.

Member & Guest Guide

Audience: Member, Guest

Plain-English, step-by-step guides for the people who use the club — members signing in to book a stay, and guests staying without a login. These pages live in the repository under docs/user-guide/ — the source of truth — and are automatically mirrored to the project wiki for easy reading (scripts/sync-user-guide-wiki.mjs, run by the Wiki sync workflow on every push to main). Propose changes by pull request; direct wiki edits are overwritten. If you run the club day to day, you want the operator guides instead; if you are evaluating or configuring a fork, start at the documentation hub.

These guides describe the public and member-facing side of the app (the website, the sign-in page, your dashboard, the booking wizard, your profile) — the routes under /, not the /admin/* console. They are the batch-5 deliverable of the documentation programme (issue #2050) and are scoped from UX_FLOW_MAP.md and the public route tree, not the admin-only COVERAGE_MATRIX.md.

Every screen and figure here comes from the seeded demo club Example Mountain Club, so your own club's name, colours, fees, and lodge capacity will differ — the steps are the same.

In-app help is distilled from these guides. The chat-style help widget (epic #2094) answers members in-app from a hand-distilled corpus in src/lib/help/member-help.ts (and the public corpus in public-help.ts), each entry naming the guide it came from. These short in-app answers are a distillation, not a copy — when you change a member guide here, review and update the matching entry in that corpus in the same pull request so the two never drift.

How these guides are written (member-guide skeleton)

The STYLE_GUIDE.md defines the operator-guide skeleton (what it is → when → step-by-step → settings → troubleshooting → related). The member guides keep the same spirit with member-appropriate section names, so every page in this folder reads the same way. Each guide uses this order:

1. What it is — one or two plain sentences: what this journey lets you do, and where you start it (the page you open or the link you click), with the route in code (e.g. /book).
2. When you'd use it — the real situations that bring a member or guest here.
3. Step-by-step — numbered actions with the exact button/field names, and a screenshot at each capturable page. Multi-step wizard screens and pop-up dialogs (the guests/review/pay steps, the cancellation confirm) are described in prose — the screenshot harness only reaches whole pages by URL, so those in-page steps carry no screenshot by design.
4. What it costs / what to expect — the member-facing equivalent of a settings table: what you pay (always shown in dollars, formatted from the integer cents the club stores), what the policy actually does, and the timing you should expect. A table where there are figures or options to compare. The heading is "What it costs / what to expect" on guides whose section covers money figures (the booking and paying guides), and plain "What to expect" on guides that do not.
5. Troubleshooting — symptom → why it happens → what you can do yourself, and when to contact the club office instead.
6. Related links — back to this index and the documentation hub, the sibling member guides, and the authoritative policy or reference docs that own the deeper detail.

Conventions carried through every guide, matching the domain rules in DOMAIN_INVARIANTS.md:

• Audience label under the title lists who the guide is for. Audience: Member, Guest is the default order; Guest, Member is used when the journey starts as a guest (as Joining the club does, before a login exists).
• Money is always shown in dollars (e.g. $90.00). The club stores every amount in integer cents; the app formats it to dollars everywhere you see it.
• Dates are NZ date-only lodge nights. A stay from check-in to check-out is counted in nights, never in hours or time zones — "7 Sept — 9 Sept" is two nights (7th and 8th).
• Screenshots live under ../images/public/ and are captured by the shared harness (e2e/tools/capture-screenshots.ts) against the seeded demo data, never hand-cropped.

The guides

• Joining the club — apply for membership, get your two nominators to confirm, wait for committee approval, then set up your login and sign in for the first time.
• Booking a stay — the booking wizard end to end: pick your nights, add member and non-member guests, understand the Members First provisional hold versus First Paid, First In, and confirm.
• Paying for your stay — paying by card (Stripe) or by internet banking against a Xero invoice, split charges for non-member guests, and using account credit.
• Managing your family & household — family groups, the billing member, adding infants/children/youth, inviting adults, and recording a partner.
• Managing your account — your profile and personal details, changing your email or password, two-factor authentication, the email sign-in link, Google sign-in, notification preferences, and your privacy / data-download / account-deletion rights.
• The waitlist & offers — joining the waitlist for a full night, opting into other lodges, and accepting an offer before it expires.
• Changing or cancelling a booking — changing dates or guests, cancelling, and understanding whether you get a refund or account credit.

Related links

• Back to the documentation hub.
• Operator (admin) guides: ../guides/.
• The journey map these guides are scoped from: UX_FLOW_MAP.md.
• Policy references: CANCELLATIONS.md, AUTHORITATIVE_FEES.md, STATE_MACHINES.md.