Trips guide
Day-by-day itineraries made from live routes and hotels: sell them with dates and prices, or build one for a traveller.
Tours for sale and custom trips
A trip is a day-by-day itinerary made from your live routes and hotels. You make two kinds, and members can plan a third themselves:
A tour is a trip shown as a public page, the way a tour company shows what it sells. Give it dates and a price through a WooCommerce product and visitors can book it. Each buyer gets their own copy, as a custom trip.
A custom trip is built for particular travellers, named by email address. Only they (and you) can open it: from My trips on their account page, or through its private link. Use it for a client’s tailor-made holiday, or for each buyer of a tour.
A trip request is one a member plans from their saved places and sends to you to put together and price. See “Trips members plan themselves” below.
Trips need Routes switched on, and Pinscribe Pro.
Building a trip
1. Trips → Add a trip. Give it a title, a picture and a short description. 2. Choose Tour or Custom, and for a custom trip, the travellers’ email addresses. 3. Add the days. For each day pick its routes in the order they are driven, the stops along the way (places near that day come first), and the night’s stay: one of your hotel listings, or a one-off hotel with its check-in time, phone and booking reference. 4. Add files such as vouchers and tickets, to the whole trip or one day. 5. Set the start date and publish.
Files are kept out of the public uploads folder and only handed to people who may see the trip.
Selling a tour
1. In WooCommerce, add a product for the tour with its price (and dates, as variations, if it runs more than once). 2. In the tour, under Sell this tour, choose that product. 3. When someone buys it, they get their own custom trip, named with their email, and find it under My trips.
The Pinscribe Travellers add-on asks each buyer for the details you need after checkout (passports, flights, dietary needs) and adds them to their trip. If its details page goes missing, checkout still works and a notice tells you to put it back.
Trips members plan themselves
Signed-in members can plan a trip from the places they have saved. On their account page, under Saved places, Plan a trip from these places asks for a name, an optional first day and a day for each place, plus anything you should know (how many are going, a budget, the rooms they like). They can Send to us to book straight away or Save for later.
Requests arrive under Trips → Trip requests, with a count on the menu, and you are emailed. For each one: 1. Open it in the trip builder to add routes, stops and the nights’ stays, just as for any trip. 2. In WooCommerce, add a product for it with its price. 3. Back under Trip requests, choose that product, write a note to the member and set it to Ready to book. The member is emailed, and the trip’s page shows a Book button. When they pay, the request is marked Booked by itself. Set it to Declined, with a note saying why, if it can’t be done.
Members see where each trip stands in My trips: Sent, In review, Ready to book, Booked or Declined, with your note. They can change or delete a trip until you set it to In review; after that only you can change it. A declined trip can be changed and sent again.
Make a new product for each trip request: products that already sell one of your tours are left out of the list, as buying one would also hand over that tour. If an order is refunded or cancelled, the request goes back to Ready to book. The emails need your site to be able to send email (see Something not right?).
What travellers see
A trip’s page shows the whole trip on one map at the top, with every day listed below: its routes, stops, the night’s stay and its documents. The map opens full screen. Signed-in members can Save this trip to My trips.
On the day, Start this day opens live mode on its first route. At the end of each route, Next carries on to the next one without leaving the map, and Take me there leads to the night’s stay.
Save map for offline use keeps the map around every day’s routes, stops and hotels on the phone, so it still shows where there is no signal; best done on Wi-Fi. On a phone, Add to home screen puts the trip there like an app. In a group, travellers can choose to share where they are with each other.
A Trips page and menu
Your tours are listed together at the trips address shown on the Trips page (usually /trips/). Custom trips never appear there. In Appearance → Menus, add a Custom link called Trips pointing at it: your live tours are added under it by themselves, and new ones join as you publish them.