Otto: the tour management app for independent bands

Running a tour without a dedicated tour manager means juggling fifteen things at once. The soundcheck time is in an email. The venue contact is buried in a group chat. The train booking is in some app you haven't opened in a month. The guestlist is in your head and three different text threads. And every morning on the road, someone in the crew asks where they're sleeping tonight.

Otto fixes that. Otto is a tour management app that puts every detail of every date in one place: venue, transport, hotel, crew, guestlist, documents. It's built for the bands and small crews who run the operation themselves, without a TM and without a production budget.

Who Otto is built for

• Independent and self-managed bands who book their own dates and handle their own logistics.
• Small touring crews without a dedicated tour manager. When "the TM" is whoever in the band has the most free time that week.
• Artists scaling from 5 to 30 dates a year who've outgrown the shared Google Doc and the colour-coded spreadsheet.
• Tour managers running several artists in parallel. Otto supports multiple workspaces in a single account, so you switch between artists from the header.

If you've got a manager, a label, and a dedicated production team, you probably already have an enterprise tool. Otto isn't trying to replace that. It's the missing piece for everyone else.

Everything for every date, in one place

Every tour date in Otto has its own page, and that page holds everything the team needs:

• Venue info. Name, address, type (concert, festival, residency), city, with a map.
• Schedule. Load-in, soundcheck, doors, set times, load-out.
• Transport. Train, plane, or car bookings, with departure and arrival times, station and platform info, booking references.
• Accommodation. Hotel name, address, check-in and check-out, booking references.
• Contacts. Venue tech, promoter, sound, lighting, with phone numbers and emails one tap away.
• Documents. Fiche technique, rider, FDR, contracts, all uploaded and stored per date.
• Guestlist. Per-date list with optional max capacity, who's coming and who invited them.
• Notes. Anything else: venue quirks, parking, WiFi codes, dressing-room weirdness.

On the home screen, you get a calendar view of every upcoming date and a map of every venue, so the whole tour is one glance away.

Drop a PDF rider, Otto fills the sheet

Venues send you a tech sheet. The promoter sends a hospitality rider. Your booker forwards an FDR. Normally, you'd sit down for twenty minutes per document, copy-pasting hotel addresses and transport refs into the right fields.

In Otto, you drop the PDF onto the date page. The built-in AI reads the document and pre-fills transport, accommodation, contacts, schedule, and notes for you. You review what it found, untick anything that doesn't belong, and confirm. Twenty minutes of admin becomes thirty seconds of checking.

It works on PDFs and on photos. So if a venue hands you a paper sheet, you snap it with your phone and Otto does the rest.

A bot in your team's group chat

The crew already has a group chat. They live in it. Asking them to open a separate app for tour info is a losing battle.

Otto solves that with a bot that lives inside your team's group chat. Anyone in the crew can ask, in plain language:

• "What time is soundcheck tomorrow?"
• "Where are we sleeping in Bordeaux?"
• "What's the venue address?"
• "Who's the promoter contact?"

And the bot answers instantly, pulling from the data already in Otto. Crew members can also add a guest to the guestlist directly from the chat, and the tour manager approves pending entries with one tap. No more "wait, did you put my friend on the list?" at 9:30 pm at the door.

The bot is personalised per crew member: each person sees their own transport and the dates they're actually working, not the whole tour.

Crew, transport, and accommodation that stay in sync

The crew roster is shared across the workspace. You enter each person once (name, role, contact, dietary requirements) and they're available everywhere.

For every date, you pick which crew members are working it. Train and flight bookings can be linked to specific crew members, so when someone asks "what's my train tomorrow?", the bot knows. Hotel info is shared with the people sleeping there, not the ones driving home.

You can also add ad-hoc guests per date (featured musicians, friends helping out, a videographer for one show) without polluting your permanent crew list.

Guestlist without the door-time drama

Guestlists are where independent tours bleed time. Five people texting you names. The bassist forgetting they invited their cousin. The promoter wanting one consolidated list at 6 pm.

Otto gives each date its own guestlist with an optional max capacity. Anyone on the crew can propose a guest from the chat or the app, and the tour manager approves pending entries. You end up with one master list, one source of truth, and zero arguments at the door.

Track contracts, invoices, and money per date

Logistics is half the job. The other half is admin: did we send the fiche technique? Is the contract signed? Did we invoice this date? Are the expense reports in? Has the band been paid? Did we declare to SACEM?

Otto has a dedicated Admin tab on every date so you can keep that separate from the day-of logistics. For each show you can check off:

• Fiche technique sent
• Contract sent
• Contract signed and returned
• Invoice sent
• Expense reports sent
• Payroll done

You also log the cession fee, transport per diem, and tech rental amount for the date, plus a payroll memo and the SACEM programme number. Every date displays a small admin badge (amber while there's still something open, green once everything is done), and the calendar view shows the same status at a glance.

End of tour, you don't need to dig through six different folders to know which dates are paid and which are still pending. Otto already knows.

Built for multi-artist tour managers

If you're handling production for more than one artist, Otto supports multiple workspaces in a single account. Switch between artists from the header. Each workspace has its own dates, its own crew, its own settings. You can invite collaborators per workspace, so the right people see the right tour and nothing else.

In short

Otto is for independent bands and small touring crews who want a single source of truth for their tour, with an AI that reads documents so you don't have to and a bot that answers crew questions in the team chat. No production manager required.

If that sounds like the tool you've been duct-taping together with docs, spreadsheets, and group chats, try Otto at otto-ebon.vercel.app.