Trips turns a day of mobile appointments into a run: the stops in the order you drive them, the drive time between them, the arrival time at each one, and a hand-off to Google Maps.

Trips Booster is a paid add-on. Businesses on Pro, Flex or Max activate it themselves, and it is included on Enterprise. It is not available on Calendar Lite.

Planning or reordering a run sends nothing to your customers and does not change a booking. Reminders use the time on the booking. Marking a stop picked up or dropped off can text the customer, if you switch that on per service. See What customers see.

The charge is pro-rated for the days left in your billing cycle, and the full monthly amount applies from the next cycle. You can deactivate at any time from the same page.

Owners and admins can activate the add-on. Other team members see Trips once it is on.

You can also reach it from Billing, then Plan & Power-Ups.

Select Trips in the sidebar. The item appears for a business that has at least one mobile service.

Only services marked as mobile services become Trips stops. To mark one, open the service, go to Booking Settings, and turn on Mobile service. To see which services are already mobile, open Trips, then Mobile services.

A stop needs a street address on the appointment. A stop whose address cannot be found on the map still appears in the run with an Address not found badge. To fix the address, select the badge, then Edit Appointment.

An add-on added from View appointment → Add Item is an invoice line. It has no time slot and does not become a trip stop. It does not appear on Appointments or Trips.

If a mobile pickup, taxi, or other timed service should appear on the run, add it as a service:

See Using the booking form.

Until it is done or dismissed, a card at the top of Trips lists three things to set once:

Each item has a button that takes you to the setting. Only owners and admins are asked to set a window, because it means editing a service. Once a window is set, that item shows as done for everyone.

Up next shows the next stop in the run, with its predicted arrival, the drive to it, Navigate, and Mark as picked up or Mark as dropped off. It appears on every view.

Up next moves to the next dog as soon as you mark one picked up. It works through the pick-ups in a group first, then switches to the drop-offs once every dog in that group is in the van. The badge reads 2 of 4 picked up, then 1 of 4 dropped off.

If your services start themselves at the booked time (Settings, Automations, auto-start), Trips keeps its own record of what you have marked, so the buttons follow your run rather than the clock. Leave auto-start on: it is what completes and charges the booking for you.

Groups come from how you have Trips set to group the run on this device, so two phones set differently can be at different points in a group. What you have marked is shared.

If the day has more than one driver, Up next shows the next stop across everyone and its booked time. To see your own next stop, with its drive and predicted arrival, select Just me.

To see the whole run as a strip of stops, select Show all followed by the number of stops, for example Show all 8 stops.

The views hold the same run.

List is the default. On a day with more than one driver, Trips opens on Board unless you have chosen a view on that device. Your last-used view is remembered on that device.

On a day with more than one driver, select Just me. On a phone, select Mine in the bottom bar. The run narrows to your stops. Select it again to see everyone.

Reordering is turned off while a filter is on, because renumbering part of a run would collide with the stops you cannot see.

When two or more stops share a booked start and end, or match a named session on the team member or resource hours, Trips shows them as a walk. Stop numbers restart in each walk.

Group By on List and Board is the person or place first (team member, resource or suburb). Then is the walk: Session uses the named hours, Start time uses the booked clock.

A session name, for example Morning Group, is used only when Then is Session and the booked start and end match that session. A near miss stays a shared clock.

To show every stop as one list, open Actions, then Your van and stops, and select One run. On a day that already has walks, you can also change this from the Walks menu.

If you want a booking that sits inside a session to take that session's name even when the clocks are not exact, open Your van and stops, then Advanced, and turn on Match bookings inside a session.

Magic Optimise keeps groups that share a booked time together and puts the dogs in each group in drive order, using live traffic. Nothing is sent to customers. Reminders use the booked time.

With Keep groups in booked order on, stops booked at the same time stay in that group. Magic Optimise puts the dogs in that group in drive order, and the 8:00 am group stays before the 10:30 am group. A window on the service is when to arrive, not permission to move the group. To let Magic Optimise move every stop whatever its booked time, turn off Keep groups in booked order in the Magic Optimise dialog.

If each stop is booked at a different time, the order is already set. The hint says Nothing to reorder. Turn off Keep groups in booked order to let Magic Optimise move them. If you changed Start from or Finish at, the button reads Save start and finish instead and keeps them for next time. The same button appears while the run cannot be planned yet, for example before you choose whose run it is.

To go back to booked order, open Actions and select Back to booked order.

The order you set is saved against the appointments, so everyone on the run sees the same sequence on every device.

If the day has more than one driver, Magic Optimise asks Whose run? first. Choose a person, then optimise their run. Repeat for each driver. Open run in Google Maps asks the same question.

Magic Optimise plans up to 25 points at once, including your start and finish points. If a run has more stops than that, choose Morning (before 12:00 pm) or Afternoon (12:00 pm on) and plan each half. If one half is still too big, choose the First option, for example First 24 stops, then drag the rest into place. Above 25 points, the map still shows every stop in the order you set, but Trips cannot work out drive times, arrival times or the route line for the whole run.

If fewer than two stops are on the map, Magic Optimise lists the stops it cannot find. To fix one, select Fix address beside it, then Edit Appointment, and add the suburb and state. Then plan again.

The first time you use Magic Optimise, Trips asks how long you are at each stop:

Arrival times add this time to the drive. A booking with pick-up or drop-off included, or a service booked for four hours or more, always counts as a few minutes at each door. To change your answer, open Actions, then Your van and stops.

Open Actions, then Your van and stops. These settings are saved for your business, so every phone plans the same way, except Run shape, which is set on each device.

Leave a vehicle dimension blank to let the routing use its own default. Fill it in and the route avoids anything your van does not fit through.

If the first day Trips shows is mostly pick-ups and drop-offs, Trips opens in Collect & Return. It keeps doing that until you choose a run shape yourself.

On one person's run, each stop shows a predicted arrival, worked out from real drive time plus the time you spend at each stop. If you would reach a stop before it opens, Trips assumes you wait there until it opens. If the day has more than one driver, stops show their booked time until you select Just me or choose a person, because one route through everyone's stops is not a route anyone drives.

A stop is late when the predicted arrival is 10 minutes or more after its due time, and early when it is 10 minutes or more before the stop opens. The due time is the end of the stop's window, or the booked time when it has none. The stop's drive line turns amber and says how far out it is.

If the selected day is today, the line says how many minutes late or early. On any other day it says how many minutes after or before the booked time, or the window.

The run card titles itself from the selected day (Today's run, Yesterday's run, Tomorrow's run, or the weekday and date). It shows the stop count, the total drive time and distance, and On the road: when the run starts and finishes. The line under On the road names what it assumes about time at each stop. If the finish is on the next calendar day, it is labelled next day.

The badge on the card shows where the order came from: Booked order when nothing has been saved, Optimised straight after Magic Optimise plans the run, and Your order for any other saved order.

On a Collect & Return run, the return run starts as the reverse of your collect run within each group: last collected, first home. To change it, select Actions, Collect & Return, switch to Return run, then drag the stops or select Magic Optimise. A saved return order is kept and is never overwritten by the reverse.

Magic Optimise on the return run starts from the place you set after that group, for example the dog park, because that is where the group finished.

Customers see their booked times, not your run order. Reminders and confirmations use the time on the booking. To promise customers a window instead of an exact time, set Times customers see (previously Service Windows) on the service, under Duration & Timing. Select A message instead of a time to hide the clock, or A window to show a window. Bookings made before that keep the exact time in their confirmation and reminders. See How do I show Morning or Afternoon instead of clock times?.

Trips can text customers as you go. Two texts, each switched on per service and off until you turn it on:

To turn them on, open the service, select Notifications, and switch on the ones you want. Each text uses one SMS credit, the same as any other message. The toast after you tap says which texts went out.

On the first dog of a group there is no earlier stop to trigger the "on our way" text, so Up next offers On our way as a separate button.

Trips never promises a time. The text says you are on the way, not how many minutes away you are.

These are the same two texts a salon sends, written for a mobile round. Turn on Mobile service and "time to bring the pet in" becomes "on our way to collect", and "ready to collect" becomes "dropped off safely". There is one box for each, and the labels on the Notifications tab change with the service.

Petboost fills in the pet's name, your walker's name and your business name. To write the sentence yourself, open the service, select Notifications, and type it under the text you want to change. Leave the box empty to use the standard wording. The tags you can use are {{PetFirstName}}, {{PetIsAre}}, {{PetHasHave}} and {{TeamMemberName}}; anything else is refused when you save. Your business name and the (no-reply) tag are added for you and cannot be changed. The line under the box says whether the message sends as one SMS or two: an emoji splits any message in two.

Duplicating a service copies its wording, so a set of services cloned from one another all send the same sentence.

A customer gets at most five appointment texts a day.

Dropping off finishes the visit, and payment then follows your usual settings: if the visit is paid, for example because you charge the card on file automatically, the customer gets your usual payment receipt.

To open the run in Google Maps as a multi-waypoint route, select Open run in Google Maps. One Google Maps link fits 11 points. For a longer run, Trips opens the first link and says how many links the whole run needs. To navigate to the next stop, select Navigate on Up next. To navigate to any other stop, select its pin on the Map, then Navigate.

Trips builds an ATO vehicle log book from your recorded runs. See Vehicle log book export.