Pricing, rate cards, hotel contracting and the quotation workflow — written for tour operators, travel agencies and DMCs.
27 articles
A quotation is an offer you can revise. An invoice is a tax document saying a supply happened, and it has required contents — including one the same trip changes depending on how you sold it.
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Your client owing you money is half the cash cycle. What you owe out, and when, is the half that decides whether a good season leaves you with anything.
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The question is asked as though there were a number. There is not one — the operators who do best carry a rule for deciding it per quotation, and a floor rather than a target.
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Per-person pricing works until the group is big enough to change the shape of the trip. Then every assumption underneath the figure stops holding at once.
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The enquiry arrives on WhatsApp, the negotiation happens on WhatsApp, and the quotation is a PDF built somewhere else and dropped into the chat. That last part is where it starts costing money.
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The honest answer to "what does it cost" is a range so wide it is useless. The pricing model is the useful question, because that decides whether the cost grows with your business or against it.
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An operator selling India to a European agency is doing arithmetic most travel software has never been asked to do — and because the shape looks familiar, nobody notices until a season has gone out wrong.
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Most travel software is built for the company that owns the client. A DMC owns the ground, and almost every assumption in a normal travel CRM is wrong for that shape of business.
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Two taxes land on the same document and they behave nothing alike. One is your cost. The other is not your money at all — and since 1 April 2026 it is 2%, from the first rupee.
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At some point an agent forwards your quotation to their client with your logo on it. Usually that is the end of the relationship, because you have just introduced their client to you.
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The phrase describes two completely different products: one arranges words on a page, the other arranges words on a page and knows what they cost.
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The case for leaving Excel is not that Excel is bad. It is that a quotation is a calculation plus a set of facts that go out of date, and a spreadsheet only handles the calculation.
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Two categories sold to the same operator, often by the same salesperson, solving opposite halves of the problem. Buying the wrong one first is expensive because it still works.
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Every platform looks the same for the first ten minutes. These are the checks that separate them in the second week, when the enquiry is nine people in three rooms across two countries.
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An agent comparing three catalogues prices the two that answered. Here is the internal cost of the ones that did not, and how to close the gap without inventing a number.
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An enquiry has a half-life. The obstacle is almost never willingness — it is that answering properly means rebuilding a costing from scratch.
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Every operator has a cancellation policy. Far fewer have one the client agreed to in writing before the advance was taken.
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Transport is the second largest line on most itineraries and the one most often quoted from memory. What it actually costs, in the order the numbers appear.
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Half the disputes on a confirmed booking start with a word rather than a number. Here is what each one means on a rate sheet, and what it costs when it is assumed.
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The question is not what the exchange rate is. It is who carries the movement between the day you quote and the day you pay the supplier.
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A rate sheet arrives as four numbers in a WhatsApp image. Six months later a booking is disputed. Here is what was missing from it.
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Same hotels, same route, same vehicle class — three different per-person prices. If yours come out close to each other, something in the costing is wrong.
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The disputes are almost never about the price. They are about what the price was supposed to cover — here are the twelve lines that decide it.
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PDF, Word, email and WhatsApp — plus a white-label version for the agent who is reselling you. All from one document, so they cannot disagree.
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Your cost, your margin and your client's price are three different numbers. Here is how one quotation holds all three without ever showing the middle one.
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A room rate is not one number. It is a grid of room category, season and meal plan — and every quotation you send is a lookup into that grid.
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Most operators rebuild the same nine-night costing from scratch every time. Here is the shape that makes it reusable.
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