What a travel company actually runs on

The enquiry should land in the pipeline without anyone copying it, and the booking should reach the ledger once.

  • Enquiries from paid campaigns and social land straight in the pipeline, tagged by source, so you can see which campaign paid for itself
  • WhatsApp follow-up fires on the record rather than from someone’s personal phone, so the conversation survives a staff change

Want to know how this works out for your company? Send us the question as you would ask it.

A booking is a liability before it is revenue

A customer pays in March for travel in August. The money is in your account and the trip is still owed. Treat it as March revenue and you have inflated one quarter, deflated the next, and made the margin unreadable in both.

  • Cancellation has to unwind the deposit, the supplier commitment and any fee charged, in the right order and against the right period.
  • Partial payments are the norm, so the same booking may be part-liability and part-revenue for months.

The commission you earned and the commission that arrived

On many bookings the customer is not the source of your income. You invoice them for the trip; your margin comes from the supplier as commission, arriving later, batched, against a statement that does not map to your bookings one for one.

Matching a remittance to a contracted rate is a different task from matching a payment to an invoice. Without a recorded expectation per booking, an underpayment looks like a payment.

  • Record the expected commission on the booking, at the time of booking. Without it, reconciliation has no baseline.
  • Statements arrive batched and late. The reconciliation unit is the statement line, not the invoice.
  • Unrecovered commission is a receivable. Most travel businesses do not carry it as one, which is why nobody chases it.

Three currencies, one margin

A trip is quoted in one currency, bought in another, and settled at a rate that differs from both by the time the money moves. The margin you thought you made is set by that third number, after the sale.

The failure is rarely the rate itself. It is that the booking system and the ledger hold different ones because someone re-entered the transaction, so nobody can say which is right.

What to fix first

A travel-specific booking platform is often right for reservations. It does not remove the problems above, because the accounting still has to be correct.

  • Make the booking system and the ledger share one record, so a booking is entered once and one system owns it. The re-entry is the defect, not the tool.
  • Only then choose the reservations tooling — by then you know what it has to talk to.