Balances that arrive late, or not at all
Second and third installments slip past the due date because nobody is watching the calendar. You front the supplier deposit yourself and hope it comes back.
$4,200 fronted per trip
Departures managed since 2021
Run the whole departure from one roster: money, rooms, papers, and the note that goes out Thursday
RoamRoster holds every traveler on a trip in one place, takes her deposit and her installments on the dates you set, and pairs the roommates without another round of emails. The packing list, the meeting point and the visa reminder go out on schedule while you are somewhere with bad wifi.
- Used by 318 US organizers across 41 states
- $26.4M in trip payments collected in 2025
- A live departure set up in one afternoon
Departure 14 days out
The pile nobody sees
The trip sells out in a week. The next four months are admin.
You priced the Puglia trip, filled it from your own list, and then the real work started: chasing second payments, matching a light sleeper with someone who reads at midnight, and asking the same traveler four times for the photo page of her passport.
Rooming worked out at 11pm
Four solo travelers, two who want to share, one who changed her mind after the deposit. It is a puzzle you solve twice because the first version was on a napkin.
6 hours per departureDocuments scattered across your inbox
Passport photos, insurance certificates and dietary notes arrive as phone snapshots in twenty separate threads. The manifest is due tomorrow and two are missing.
2 travelers chased on departure weekPre departure questions on repeat
Is the water safe, how much cash, what shoes. You answer it eleven times by text because there is no single place the group trusts.
140 messages per group
Route card
Four stops between open registration and wheels up
You set the rules once per departure. RoamRoster works the roster from there, and every traveler sees only her own page.
Open the departure
Name the trip, the dates, the price per person and the single supplement. Set the deposit and up to six installment dates. Import your interest list from a CSV or add travelers by hand.
Take the money on schedule
Each traveler gets a private link with her balance and her plan. Cards are charged automatically on the dates you chose, and late balances are flagged before they become your problem.
Pair rooms and collect papers
Travelers answer six rooming questions and upload the passport page and the insurance certificate. Suggested pairs appear with the reason for the match, and you approve or override.
Send the countdown
A pre departure sequence goes out at ninety, thirty and seven days with your own packing list, meeting point and local notes. Read receipts tell you who still has not opened it.
Built around the way an independent organizer actually works
You are not a tour operator with a back office. You are one person, sometimes two, selling eight departures a year to a list you built by hand, and every hour spent on reconciliation is an hour you did not spend scouting the next itinerary.
RoamRoster keeps the trip file whole: who paid what and when, who is rooming with whom and why, which document is still missing, and what the group has been told. When a traveler calls in March about a trip in September, you open one page and answer her in under a minute.
- Works on a phone in a hotel lobby
- No traveler password to reset
- Your Stripe or Square account, your payouts
What is inside
Six parts of the job, handled properly
Every one of these exists because an organizer asked for it after a departure went sideways.
Installment plans per departure
Set a deposit and up to six dated installments, then let the card on file do the work. Travelers who join late are put on a shortened plan automatically so the final balance still clears before your supplier deadline.
Roommate pairing with reasons
Six short questions cover sleep hours, temperature, tidiness, snoring, scent sensitivity and how much talking she wants at breakfast. The suggested pair shows the two answers that matched and the one that did not, so you can make the call yourself.
Passport and insurance collection
Ask for the photo page, the policy number and the emergency contact in one request, with a reminder that repeats until the file lands. Expiry dates are read from what she uploads and flagged if the passport dies within six months of return.
Pre departure sequences
Write the ninety, thirty and seven day notes once and reuse them on every departure with the trip details swapped in. Anyone who has not opened the seven day note appears on a short list you can call.
Supplier ready manifests
Export the rooming list for the hotel, the name and passport list for the airline and the dietary sheet for the cook, each with only the fields that supplier needs. Nothing extra travels with the file.
Waitlist and cancellation handling
When a traveler drops, the next name on the waitlist is offered the seat with the balance already prorated to your cancellation policy. The refund, the credit and the paperwork are recorded against the departure so the numbers still add up in December.
What changes
The numbers organizers report after two departures
Measured across 318 US accounts between January and December 2025.
Average time balances arrive earlier, because the card on file is charged on the date you set instead of waiting for a reply to a reminder email.
Share of rooming lists finalized before the thirty day mark, since the questionnaire is part of registration rather than a separate round of messages.
Admin time saved per departure across payment chasing, document collection and answering the same pre departure question by text.
Late cancellation rate, down from a reported 4.6%, because the payment plan keeps commitment visible and the countdown notes keep travelers engaged.
Duty of care
What happens to a traveler's passport page once she sends it
You are holding identity documents for women who trusted you with them. That deserves rules, not a folder on a laptop.
Encrypted and attached to one departure
A document lives on the traveler record inside the trip it belongs to. It is never in an email thread, never in a shared drive, and never visible to another traveler on the same roster.
Deleted on your retention date
You choose how long documents survive the trip, from the day the group lands to twelve months after. When the date passes, the files are removed and the deletion is recorded in the departure log.
Every view is logged
You can see which staff seat opened which document and when. If an insurer or a supplier ever asks how a passport was handled, the answer is on one screen.
Expiry checked automatically
The expiry date is read from the page she uploads and compared to your return date plus six months. A passport that fails that test is flagged while there is still time to renew it.
Manifests carry only what is asked
The hotel export contains names and room assignments. The airline export contains names, dates of birth and passport numbers. Neither one carries her dietary notes or her rooming answers.
Your account, your payouts
Traveler money moves through your own merchant account straight to your bank. RoamRoster never holds a deposit and never takes a percentage of a trip payment.
Moving in
Bringing a trip that is already half sold
Most organizers arrive mid season with deposits taken, three rooming promises made by text and a spreadsheet they do not entirely trust. That is a normal starting point.
The import keeps what you already collected
Paste or upload your sheet and map the columns you actually use: name, email, deposit paid, balance owed, room preference, notes. Travelers who have already paid a deposit are marked as paid, and their remaining balance is spread over the dates you still have left before the supplier deadline.
Nobody on your roster is emailed until you say so. You can run the first departure quietly, check the numbers against your own records, and only then turn on the traveler links.
If two versions of the truth disagree, RoamRoster shows you both and asks you to pick. It never silently overwrites a payment you entered by hand.
- Day one: import the roster, set the plan, check the totals against your bank.
- Day two: send the private links with a short note in your own words.
- Week one: open the rooming questionnaire and the document request.
- Week two: load your ninety, thirty and seven day notes as templates.
- Ongoing: open the next departure by duplicating the one that worked.
From the field
Organizers who stopped rebuilding the spreadsheet
Three women running small group trips out of Oregon, Georgia and New Mexico.
I run eight departures a year and the second installment used to be a full week of my life. Now I look at one column on a Monday and there is nothing to chase. The Portugal group paid in full three weeks before I had to wire the hotel.
The rooming questions did something I did not expect. Two women I would have paired on instinct answered completely differently about sleep, and the app caught it. Nobody moved rooms in Morocco for the first time in four years.
My travelers are mostly over sixty and I was sure the private link would be a problem. It was the opposite. They forward it to their daughters, upload the passport page from their phones, and my inbox went quiet.
318US organizers running departures on RoamRoster
$26.4MTraveler payments collected during 2025
96.2%Installments cleared on the first attempt
Who runs on it
Different trips, the same four problems
The roster does not care whether your group is hiking the Dolomites or eating their way through Oaxaca. It cares who paid, who is sharing, whose passport is short and who has not read the note.
Culinary and market trips
Ten to sixteen travelers, a fixed table booking and a cook who needs the allergy list two weeks out. The dietary export goes straight to the kitchen without the rest of the roster attached.
Walking and hiking departures
Grade the group by pace, keep the insurance certificate mandatory, and send the boot and layer list at ninety days when there is still time to break them in.
Wellness and writing retreats
Single rooms sell out first and the supplement decides the margin. Room type sits on the payment plan, so a traveler upgrading in month three is billed the difference automatically.
Milestone and reunion trips
Groups who already know each other still need balances tracked and passports collected. Pairing is turned off, rooming is entered by hand, and everything else runs the same way.
I moved four departures over in one week in February. The part I did not expect was the quiet: no Sunday night text about a balance, no third email asking for an insurance certificate, and my accountant finally got one clean export in January.
Plans
Priced per organizer, not per traveler
Your card fees stay with your own payment processor. We never take a cut of a deposit.
One Trip
$39 per month
For the organizer who keeps one departure on sale at a time and closes the account between seasons.
- One live departure, unlimited travelers
- Deposit plus six installment dates
- Roommate questionnaire and pairing
- Passport and insurance collection
- Pre departure sequence with read receipts
- CSV and XLSX manifest exports
Season Pass
$99 per month
The plan most organizers settle on: every departure you have on sale at once, from the spring scouting trip to the December markets.
- Unlimited live departures
- Waitlist and cancellation handling
- Traveler history carried across trips
- Saved message templates and packing lists
- Payment due date calendar feed
- Refund and credit ledger per departure
- Priority email support within one business day
Tour Business
$209 per month
For an operation with guides in the field and someone answering the office phone while you are abroad.
- Everything in Season Pass
- Three staff seats with per guide permissions
- On trip guide view with the day manifest
- Supplier export presets per hotel and airline
- Read only API and webhook feed
- Document access log and retention rules
- Onboarding session with an organizer on our team
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from your account settings. No annual contract, no per traveler fee, no setup charge.
Questions
What organizers ask before they move a live trip
One Trip is $39 per month and keeps a single departure open with its full roster, payment plan and messaging. Season Pass is $99 per month and covers every departure you have on sale at the same time, which is what most organizers running four to ten trips a year choose. Tour Business is $209 per month and adds a second and third staff seat, per guide permissions and the supplier export. Every plan is billed monthly and you can cancel at any time, so an organizer who runs two trips a year often keeps One Trip open during the selling season only.
Most organizers have a live departure running the same afternoon they start. You import travelers from a CSV or paste them from your sheet, set the deposit and the installment dates, and the balance schedule is calculated for every traveler at once. Rooming and document requests can be turned on later without disturbing anyone who has already paid. The longest part is usually deciding your own cancellation windows, not the setup.
Traveler documents are stored encrypted and attached to the departure they belong to, not emailed around. You choose an expiry date per trip, and RoamRoster deletes the files automatically after that date once the group is home. Only you and the staff seats you invite can open a document, and every view is logged. You can also export a manifest with only the fields a hotel or airline actually asks for.
Payments run through your own Stripe or Square account, so the money reaches your bank on your existing schedule and your accountant sees nothing new. Rosters and rooming lists export to CSV and XLSX for suppliers who want a spreadsheet, and there is a calendar feed for payment due dates. Booking confirmations can be forwarded to a per trip inbox address and land on the traveler record. A read only API is available on Tour Business for organizers who keep their own site in sync.
You cancel from your account settings and the plan ends at the close of the billing month, with no exit call and no fee. Before that date you can export every roster, payment history, rooming list and message thread as CSV plus the document files as a zip. Your account then goes read only for sixty days so you can retrieve anything you missed. After sixty days the data is deleted permanently.
Nobody has to create a password. Each traveler gets a private link that opens her own page with her balance, her documents and her rooming answer, and that link keeps working from her email. If she would rather call you, you can enter a payment, upload her passport or record her rooming choice on her behalf and she still gets the confirmation. Organizers running trips for travelers in their sixties and seventies tell us the private link is the reason the group stopped calling about balances.
Standing behind it
Support from people who have run a departure
Nobody answering your email will ask you to describe what a single supplement is.
Median first reply time to a support email during US business hours in 2025, measured across every account regardless of plan.
Working calls each month where account holders open a real trip file with us and ask for changes. Every rooming question in the product came out of one of those calls.
Payment logic changes shipped during a customer's high season without written notice first. Your selling window is not a good time for surprises.
Departure week has a phone number
In the seven days before a group flies, accounts on Season Pass and Tour Business can reach us by phone as well as email. That is the week when a traveler changes her passport, a hotel moves a room block, or a balance bounces, and none of those wait for an inbox.
We keep a written record of every fix on your account so the next person who answers already knows the history of your trip.
What we will tell you plainly
- If your trip is too small to need this yet, we will say so.
- If a feature you need is not built, we will give you a date or a no.
- If your payment processor is a poor fit, we will explain why before you subscribe.
- If a number on this page stops being true, we change the page.
The Roster
The Roster: what we are reporting on this month
Our magazine for organizers who run small group trips for women. Every report answers one question about the money, the paperwork or the rooming list, and it answers it in full.
Talk to us
Bring your next departure and we will set it up with you
Tell us the trip you are selling right now, and we will walk the roster, the payment plan and the rooming questions with you on a call. Thirty minutes, your own numbers, no slide deck.
We reply within one business day, and we never add you to a mailing list. If a departure date is close and you would rather skip the form, email the trip details straight to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.