Skip to content
Bifröst OrbitDocs

Get started with Travel Orbit

What Travel Orbit does, why the money never passes through us, and the first steps from an empty organisation to a trip people can book.

Tutorial3 min read

Travel Orbit is where you build trips, take bookings and collect every payment, from the deposit to the last instalment. Travellers book on your booking pages or on your own website, pay by card or any other method your Stripe account offers, and manage their booking in the traveller portal.

We never touch your money

You connect your own Stripe account. Every payment, refund and payout happens in that account, under your name, and arrives in your bank as it would without us. Bifröst Orbit never holds funds, never acts as the seller and takes no fee on bookings: you pay for Travel Orbit with a subscription, whatever you sell.

Card details never reach our servers either. Travellers type them into Stripe's own payment form, so you stay on the simplest PCI level, as with any Stripe checkout.

First steps

  1. Connect Stripe: An Admin pastes a restricted key under Stripe. Until then, bookings arrive as requests and nobody can pay online. See Connect your Stripe account.
  2. Fill in your booking settings: Your brand, logo and colour, the address of your booking pages, and the legal details travellers must see before they book. See Booking settings.
  3. Create a trip: Give it a name, a description, images and a price. See Create a trip.
  4. Add departures: The dates people can travel, with how many places each one has. See Departures and places.
  5. Set the payment plan: A deposit, the balance and any instalments. See Prices, extras and payment plans.
  6. Publish: The trip appears on your booking pages, and bookings arrive under Bookings. See Bookings.

The overview

Overview is the first screen you see. Until you are set up, Get ready to sell lists the steps above that are still open for your role: create your first trip, add a price and departures and publish it, connect Stripe, and fill in your booking settings. Select the × at its top right to hide it for good; everything in it is also in the sidebar.

  • The numbers: bookings, travellers and money received in the last 30 days, each compared with the 30 days before, what is due in the next 30 days, what is still to be paid on confirmed bookings, and the travellers to come. Select a number to open the screen behind it.
  • Needs your attention: travellers who replied, follow-ups that are due, requests assigned to you or waiting, automatic payments that failed, overdue payments, departures close to full, and Stripe problems. When there's nothing, it says All clear.
  • Latest bookings, Sales over the last 90 days and Coming up: the newest bookings, a chart of sales, and the next departures with how full they are.
  • Quick links: New booking, New trip, Departures, Payments, Discount codes and Booking settings, depending on your role.

Bookings count when they are confirmed or asked for. Money received counts card payments through Stripe and payments recorded by hand, less refunds. Totals are shown in the currency chosen under Show money in in Booking settings; amounts in other currencies are converted with the European Central Bank's daily rates and marked with ≈.

Who can do what

Orbit decides who can open Travel Orbit. Owners and admins of your organisation are Admins here; everyone else starts as a Viewer, and an Admin can make them Editors. See Who can do what.

Was this page helpful?

Read next

Connect your Stripe accountMake a restricted key in Stripe with exactly the access Travel Orbit needs, paste it in, and know what happens if the key stops working.Create a tripAdd a trip with its description, images and facts, choose who can see it and how people book, then publish it.BookingsHow a booking moves from checkout to confirmed, how to find bookings, answer requests and record payments made outside Stripe.Booking settingsYour booking address and brand, emails to travellers, languages, checkout, the currency totals are shown in, icons, kinds of day, meals, the organiser's legal details and your travel guarantee.Who can do whatViewers read everything, Editors also run trips and bookings, Admins also manage Stripe, refunds, settings, keys and people, and only owners delete images for good.TroubleshootingWhat the messages in Travel Orbit mean and what to do about them, for trips, departures, bookings, payments, Stripe, the traveller portal, AI writing and languages.