There are other issues with GV too; the biggest being that a number cannot be assigned as a "mobile" number on more than one account; so if anyone in the group uses GV, they won't want to have their number disconnected from their GV just to use your setup.  Also, you cannot have GV forward to another GV number.

I think you've hit upon the closest solution without paying for a business-oriented spam/marketing bulk SMS system.
Have GV forward to an email account; parse that out to pull a tag (containing 0ga0/0gb0 usually works and it's fast(ish) to type on A9 keypads) and forward to a list of SMS email endpoints based on the tag.  It might be good to also have unrecognized SMS forwarded to you so you can "reroute" when people goof up.

There is an alternative if you don't mind locking an older phone to a computer back home for the duration of your trip (http://smslink.sourceforge.net/).  That system allows you to have an sms received on the attached phone forwarded to a customized email output, and you could, relatively easily, add support for sending back out via sms.
It's a bit rough and not the most reliable, but it seems to work.

On 06/06/2011 05:02 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
> Some feedback on the google voice idea....
>