Jimenez Julien, the author and product lead of RoamRoster
I build RoamRoster with the organizers who use it, one departure at a time. This page explains where the product came from, how I work with the trade, and what I answer for personally.
Why I built a roster instead of another booking engine
The first organizer I sat with ran nine trips a year out of a two bedroom apartment in Asheville, North Carolina. She had a booking page that took a deposit and then stopped being useful, and a spreadsheet with forty two columns that did everything else: balances, rooming, passport expiry dates, food allergies, the note about who was travelling three months after a divorce and would rather not share. She rebuilt that sheet every January. She had never once trusted it in June.
That afternoon changed what I was building. The market was full of booking engines that solve the first ten minutes of a trip and nothing after. The work that actually eats an independent organizer's year happens between the deposit and the airport: the second installment, the roommate who cannot sleep in a warm room, the insurance certificate that never arrives, the seven day note that has to say exactly the right thing about cash and shoes. So RoamRoster starts where the sale ends. One departure, one roster, and every piece of that departure attached to it.
I spent 2021 shadowing organizers rather than writing code. I sat in on pre departure calls. I read four years of real payment histories with the numbers changed, and I learned that late balances are almost never about money, they are about the reminder arriving in a thread the traveler had already scrolled past. I watched a woman in Boise pair fourteen roommates on a legal pad at midnight and explain her reasoning out loud, and that hour became the six question rooming survey the product ships with today. The questions are hers. I only wrote them down.
What I learned about this trade
Small group travel for women is a trade with a hard edge under the beautiful photographs. Margins are thinner than outsiders assume. A single traveler dropping out at forty days can erase the profit on a departure if the single supplement was not covered. Suppliers want their money on a calendar that has nothing to do with when your travelers pay. And the reputation that fills your next trip is built on a hundred small operational courtesies: knowing that someone is a light sleeper, remembering that a traveler's mother died between booking and departure, getting the meeting point right so nobody stands on the wrong corner in Lisbon at 7am.
Organizers in this trade are not looking for a system that thinks for them. They are looking for one that stops dropping things. That is the standard I hold the product to: RoamRoster should never surprise an organizer in front of her travelers, and it should never make her explain a piece of software to a woman who just wants to know what she owes.
How I work with operators
Every feature ships after at least three organizers have run a real departure with it. I read every support message myself and answer most of them. Twice a month I run a working call with a small group of account holders where we look at an actual trip file, not a demo. When something in the product is wrong, I say so in writing and give a date. When a request does not fit the product, I say that too, and I tell people what I would use instead.
Experience and expertise
- Fifteen years building operational software for small businesses that run on deadlines and deposits.
- Four years working exclusively with independent travel organizers on payment plans, rooming logic and document retention.
- Direct work with 318 US organizer accounts, from a single annual departure to operations running more than twenty trips a year.
- Practical knowledge of traveler document handling, retention windows and what a hotel or airline manifest genuinely needs to contain.
- Founder of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes RoamRoster and stands behind its billing and its support.
How this product is built and maintained
RoamRoster is written and operated by a small team under my direction. Payments are processed through the organizer's own merchant account, so we never sit between a traveler and her money. Traveler documents are encrypted, access logged, and deleted on the retention date set for the departure. We publish a changelog with every release and we do not ship changes to payment logic during a customer's high season without telling them first.
The words on this site are mine. Every statistic quoted here comes from aggregated account data for the 2025 calendar year, and every testimonial is from a named organizer who reviewed her quote before it was published. If a number on this site is wrong, write to me and I will correct it and say what changed.
Contact the author
Email reaches me directly at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. If you run trips and something here does not match your experience of the trade, that is the message I most want to receive. You can also start with the walkthrough request form and ask for me by name.
Published articles
These are the nine reports Jimenez Julien has written for The Roster, the RoamRoster magazine on the business of small group travel for women.
- How much deposit should I collect to hold a woman's spot on a small group trip?
- Do I need a seller of travel license to run group trips out of my own state?
- What is the fairest way to pair roommates when half my travelers are strangers?
- Should I buy tour operator liability insurance or just require travelers to insure themselves?
- Why do my trips sell out but still barely break even by the final payment date?
- How do I collect passports and emergency contacts without becoming a data breach risk?
- What actually happens when one traveler cancels six weeks before a twelve person trip?
- Are women only trips getting harder to fill, or is the buyer just changing on me?
- What does it really take to lead a first trip in a country I have only visited twice?