Trip Builder turns a group too big for one home into a single shareable trip: you (or your guests themselves) pick several nearby homes for the same dates, and everyone books their own place from one link that tracks the group’s progress.
What it does #
When a large group inquires, they usually need several homes for the same dates, and coordinating that by email and text is painful. Somebody double-books, somebody books the wrong nights, and you spend a week playing switchboard. Trip Builder solves it from both directions:
- You build the trip. Assemble a curated package of listings from the Trip Builder admin screen, set one shared date range and party size, and hand the group a single link.
- Guests build their own. With guest self-serve search turned on, a visitor enters their dates and group size on a public search page, gets matching home combinations back immediately, and saves one as a trip without waiting on you to reply.
Either way the result is the same shareable trip page at /trip/<link>: every home in the package with its live price, a Book this one button per home, and a progress bar that tracks the group as bookings land. A 14-person family reunion split across three homes prices each home for its own occupants, watches “2 of 3 homes booked” update on its own, and nobody double-books.
How to turn it on #
1. Switch on the tool #
In your WordPress admin, go to HomeRunner > Conversion Kit, open the Trip Builder section, and switch on Enable this tool. This gives you the staff-side builder under the Trip Builder entry in the HomeRunner admin menu.
2. Turn on guest self-serve search (optional) #
In the same Trip Builder settings section, check Guest self-serve search. It is off by default, so nothing changes on your site until you flip it. Once on, a public search page appears at /group-stays/ and the guest entry points described below go live.
3. Mark which properties guests can be paired into #
Open a property and find the Trip Builder box in the sidebar, then check Group-stay eligible. In the default eligibility mode, every property is treated as eligible until you tag at least one, at which point only tagged properties are used. The Group eligible column on the properties list shows the tag at a glance.
The guest experience #
The public page at /group-stays/ asks the guest for a check-in date, a check-out date, and their group size. By default it also asks how far apart the homes can be, in miles: a starting preference rather than a hard limit, since guests can leave it blank for any distance and the search widens the area automatically when nothing fits nearby. If you’d rather guests skip straight to dates and group size, you can hide that distance question entirely (see Guest distance field in Settings below); the search then runs on your configured pairing radius, widening the same way it would if a guest had left the field blank.
Results come back as combination cards, each with photos, sleeps/bedroom/bathroom counts, live pricing for every home, and a small numbered map showing roughly where the homes sit relative to each other. Map pins use rounded, neighborhood-level positions rather than exact addresses, so the map gives a sense of layout without publishing precise property locations. The search only offers homes your booking system confirms are actually available for those dates, so a guest never gets a combination that turns out to be blocked once they try to book it. From the results, a guest can:
- Swap any one home in a combination for an alternative that still fits the group and the dates.
- Compare up to 3 combinations side by side, seeing total price, sleeps, number of homes, and how far apart the properties are for each option.
- Choose a combination and save it as a trip.
Saving is instant by default: the guest gets their shareable trip link right away, with no email asked for. If you turn on Require email to save a trip, a Save this trip window asks for their email address first, and the trip link is also sent to them by email. Either way, you receive an email notification for every saved trip, with the guest’s email when one was collected, the dates, the group size, and the trip link. A self-serve search always turns into a lead you can follow up on, never a silent visit.
When the group is large enough that no combination fits within the usual bundle size, the search tries harder before giving up: it re-checks every eligible property as a possible starting point and lets a combination grow up to 8 homes to cover the whole party. If even that falls short, guests see the closest fit along with how many spots it misses, plus up to three nearby date suggestions as clickable chips, all within about two weeks of the dates they searched and confirmed by the same matching search to actually sleep the whole group. Guests can also email you directly with their dates and group size prefilled, so a failed search never ends in a dead end.
The trip page #
Every saved trip, whether you built it or a guest did, lives on the same kind of shareable page. It opens with the trip name, the shared check-in and check-out dates, the number of nights, the party size, and a progress bar reading “2 of 3 homes booked” (or “All homes booked” once everyone has reserved). Each home appears as a card with a clickable photo, its sleeps/bedroom/bathroom count, name, live price, and a status badge:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not yet booked | The home is still open. The card shows its price and a Book this one button. |
| Booked | Someone in the group has reserved this home, with the date it was booked. |
| No longer available | The home is no longer bookable for the trip. |
| Replaced | The home has been swapped out of the package. |
- Book this one opens that home’s booking page in a new tab with the trip’s dates and guest count already filled in, capped at the home’s own occupancy, so the booking widget shows a live quote right away instead of asking the guest to re-enter anything.
- The page keeps itself current. It re-checks every home whenever a guest returns to the tab, and it keeps checking every half minute while the page stays open, stopping for good once every home is booked. The organizer can leave the trip page open and watch the group’s bookings land without ever hitting refresh.
- Each open home shows its total for the stay and per-night rate, quoted live with the guest count capped at that home’s occupancy, so a 14-person group split across three homes prices each home correctly instead of quoting all 14 guests against one unit. Once every open home has priced, a combined total including taxes and fees appears at the top: “Combined package total” before anyone has booked, or “Total for the remaining homes” once bookings start coming in, so the figure only ever reflects what is still available.
- Pricing needs the HomeRunner plugin active on the site. If live pricing cannot be confirmed for the dates, the page says so and notes that each home’s exact total appears at checkout, rather than showing nothing.
- A Copy trip link button makes it easy for anyone in the group to re-share the link.
Link previews #
Whenever a trip link or your /group-stays/ search page link gets pasted into a text message, Slack, or a social post, the preview card that appears now shows a real description and photo instead of a blank or broken “Page Not Found” preview.
- A saved trip’s preview uses the first home’s photo in the package, falling back to your site logo and then to no photo if neither is available, along with a one-line summary of the homes, guest count, and dates.
- The
/group-stays/search page previews with a description of what the page does and your site logo. - If you run an SEO plugin like Rank Math and have set a site-wide social image there, that image is used for the search page preview instead of your logo, so it stays consistent with the rest of your site’s shares.
The staff builder #
Open Trip Builder in the HomeRunner admin menu and start a New trip. Give it a name (for example “Smith Family Reunion”) and set the check-in date, check-out date, and total party size, then search for homes and add them one at a time. The picker matches on the property’s public name, its internal address name (the nickname you use in your PMS, like “263 A St. Philip”), or its listing ID, so you can find a unit even when you only remember the address. Each result also shows how many guests the home sleeps, which makes it easy to build a package that fits the whole party. Combined listings (a paired unit like A+B) are flagged with a warning; pick the individual units instead, otherwise the package counts the same building twice.
Save the trip and you get the shareable /trip/<link> to send to the group: “Here is a package for your group: [link].” Every trip on the site, whether you created it or a guest saved it, is listed under All trips with its dates, party size, listings, and how many homes are booked so far. From there you can:
- Copy link: grab the shareable trip link again without hunting through old messages.
- Edit: reopen the trip to change its name, dates, party size, or which homes are included. You can reorder or swap out homes that have not been booked yet. Once a listing is booked, its dates are locked and it cannot be removed from the trip (the guest already reserved those nights). If you need different dates or to drop a booked home, create a new trip instead.
- Delete: remove a trip and its shareable link entirely. You will be asked to confirm, since this cannot be undone and the shared link stops working immediately.
Where guests get invited in #
With guest self-serve search on, your site points guests at it exactly when a single home stops fitting their party. Every one of these carries the guest’s dates and group size into the search form, so they arrive with everything prefilled:
- A banner over search results. When a guest searches Explorer for a group of at least the Explorer banner minimum group size (default 10), a dismissible banner appears over the results: “Traveling with 12 people? We can pair nearby homes so your whole group stays together.” The banner also rescues smaller parties that are still too big for your inventory: whenever the group outgrows your largest single home, it appears regardless of the minimum, reading “No single home sleeps 14.”, since a one-home search can never succeed for that party.
- Notes in guest pickers. When a guest maxes out the guest picker in your booking widget or search bar, or dials in more people than any single home on your site sleeps, a note appears right in the picker (“Need room for more than 12? We can pair nearby homes so everyone stays together.”) with an Explore group stays link.
- A note on listing pages. A guest who lands on a property page with a party bigger than that home holds sees “This home sleeps up to 8. Need more room? We can pair it with nearby homes.”
Settings #
All of these live in HomeRunner > Conversion Kit under Trip Builder, except the per-property tag, which lives on each property’s edit screen.
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Guest self-serve search | Turns on the public /group-stays/ search page and the guest entry points above. Off by default; the staff builder works without it. |
| Eligibility tag mode | Optional (default): every property is eligible until you tag one, then only tagged properties are used. Required: only tagged properties are ever used. |
| Pairing radius (meters) | How close together paired properties must be. Default 4,000m (about 2.5 miles); widens automatically up to 16,000m (about 10 miles) when nothing fits. Guests always see and enter distances in miles. |
| Guest distance field | Off by default: guests can set their own starting distance on the guest search bar. Turn it on to hide the “How far apart?” field entirely, so guests just enter dates and group size and the search uses your pairing radius above, widening automatically. |
| Max anchor properties | How many of your largest-sleeping properties are tried as a combination’s starting point. Default 5. |
| Preferred properties per bundle | Your preferred combination size, default 4. Not a hard cap: the search grows a combination past this, up to 8 properties, when a large group needs it to cover everyone. |
| Explorer banner minimum group size | The smallest Explorer search party that triggers the group-stays banner. Default 10. The banner still appears below this number whenever the party outgrows your largest single home. |
| Require email to save a trip | Off by default: guests get their trip link immediately, no email asked. Turn it on to ask for an email address before the link is shown; the guest then also receives the link by email. You get a notification email for every saved trip either way. |
| Group-stay eligible (per property) | Marks an individual property as eligible for guest self-serve pairing. Set it from the Trip Builder box on the property’s edit screen, or scan the Group eligible column on the properties list. |
Tips #
- Trip Builder is one tool in the kit; the Conversion Kit: Overview shows what else pairs well with it.
- Pair it with the Split Cost Calculator so each household can see its share of the total instantly.
- Building trips by hand works well for occasional inquiries. If group requests are a regular part of your business, turning on guest self-serve search takes the manual matching off your plate.
- If a property never shows up in guest self-serve results, check its Group-stay eligible box on the property edit screen. That is the first thing to check after switching Eligibility tag mode to Required, and in the default Optional mode remember that tagging your first property immediately excludes every untagged one.
- Saved-trip notifications go to your site’s admin email address, the same place WordPress sends its own notices, so make sure someone reads that inbox.
- Dates are locked to one range for the whole group, which matches how weddings and reunions actually travel. Once any home in the trip is booked, the trip’s dates lock for good. Edit everything else freely, but start a new trip if the group needs different dates.