The spreadsheet tax

Before we start, a quick question. How many tools did it take to sell the last trip you sold?

Don't answer straight away. Actually count. Most operators I ask start counting on their fingers, and then they run out of fingers.

I'm Eric, from TripCreator, and this is the first of ten episodes about how travel businesses build, sell and run trips. We'll start wide and get more specific as we go. The first two episodes are about the whole industry. The next five each take one kind of travel business. The last three are about features, ending with the AI.

Today is the widest one of all: a problem every travel business shares, whatever kind of travel it sells. I call it the spreadsheet tax. Over the next twenty minutes I want to do three things. Show you where the tax is hiding in your business. Give you a rough way to put a number on it. And explain what the alternative actually looks like, without the sales gloss.

Let's take one ordinary trip. A couple, eight days, a few hotels, a hire car and two excursions. Nothing unusual. Where does that trip actually live?

It starts with the costing, and that's nearly always a spreadsheet. Hotel rates in one column, transfers in another, and a markup formula someone built three years ago. Only one person really understands it, and there's probably a cell somewhere that says "don't touch".

Then you need something the customer will actually read. So you open Word, or Canva, or a PDF template. You copy the hotel names, the dates and the descriptions across, and you paste in some photos. That's tool number two.

The customer says yes, so now you book. That happens in your inbox: an email to each hotel, each transfer company, each excursion. The confirmations come back into the same inbox, mixed in with everything else. That's three.

Then you invoice. That's in the accounting system, and someone types the amounts in again. That's four. The vouchers live in a shared drive. That's five. And whatever you use to remember that the customer exists, whether it's a CRM, a notebook or someone's memory, makes six.

Six tools for one trip, with the same hotel name typed into almost every one of them.

That's the spreadsheet tax. It isn't what the software costs. It's the cost of moving information between tools by hand.

Counting tools is one way to see the tax. A better way is to follow one trip through a normal week, and watch every time information changes hands.

Monday morning, the enquiry arrives by email. Someone reads it and copies the dates and the number of travellers into a spreadsheet, or into the CRM, or both. That's the first hand-off.

Monday afternoon, they build the costing. They look up rates for each hotel, often in a separate file or an old supplier email, and type them into the costing sheet. Second hand-off, and it's a big one, because every rate is a chance to pick the wrong season or the wrong room type.

Tuesday, they write the proposal. The hotel names, dates and descriptions are copied from the costing sheet into a document. The total price is copied from the costing sheet too. Third hand-off.

Wednesday, the customer writes back. Could we swap the second hotel for something by the sea? So now the change has to be made twice: once in the costing, once in the proposal. And if you're unlucky, the person who changes the proposal isn't the person who changes the costing.

Thursday, the customer says yes. Now someone writes to each supplier with the dates, names and room types, copied from the proposal. Fourth hand-off, multiplied by the number of suppliers.

Friday, the deposit invoice goes out. The amount is copied from the costing sheet into the accounting system. Fifth hand-off.

And that's just the first week. Over the following months there's the balance invoice, the final documents, vouchers, perhaps a name change, perhaps a flight change, and a final check before departure. Each one is another round of copying.

If you counted every hand-off in that trip's life, you'd probably get somewhere between ten and twenty. And each one is a place where the trip can quietly change shape.

The tax gets paid in four places.

The first is re-typing. The same product details get entered again for every quote, every version and every document. It's slow, and it's where mistakes come from. When a voucher has the wrong date on it, the cause is usually a copy-paste.

The second is price drift. This one is quiet and expensive. You send the customer version three of the itinerary, but the costing sheet is still on version two because someone forgot to update it. The customer accepts a price that doesn't match your costs, and you only find out when the supplier's invoice arrives. If you've run a travel business for more than a season, you've probably lived this. The worst part is that you can't charge the customer the difference. They accepted a price in good faith. The loss is yours.

The third is slow replies. When a proposal takes two or three days to put together, the customer has often booked with whoever answered first. In travel, how fast you reply is a big part of whether you win the booking, and the spreadsheet tax makes you slow. Not because your team is slow, but because so much of their time goes into copying rather than thinking.

The fourth is lost knowledge. Your best supplier rates, your best routes, which guide is great with families: it's all in one person's head or one person's file. When that person goes on holiday, or leaves, the knowledge goes with them. Every travel business has had the experience of a key person leaving and taking two years of supplier relationships out of the door.

None of these is a disaster on its own, and that's exactly why the tax survives. Each cost is small. But you pay them on every trip, every week, across your whole team.

Let's try to put a rough number on it, because "it's a hidden cost" is easy to nod along to and then ignore.

Here's a simple way to estimate it for your own business. Take one typical trip and count the hand-offs, the times information is copied from one place to another. Let's say it's twelve. Then estimate how long each one takes on average, including finding the information, typing it and checking it. Let's say ten minutes. That's two hours per trip, spent purely on moving information around.

Now multiply by the number of trips you handle in a year. If it's three hundred trips, that's six hundred hours. That's about fifteen working weeks. In other words, roughly a third of one person's year goes into copying.

These numbers are only an example. Your trips might have more hand-offs, or fewer, and your team might be faster. But do the arithmetic with your own numbers. Almost everyone who does it is surprised, and the surprise is usually in the wrong direction.

And that's just the time. It doesn't include the price-drift losses, the bookings lost to slow replies, or the cost of fixing mistakes after they reach a customer or a supplier. Those are harder to measure, but if you think back over the last year, you can probably name a few.

So what's the alternative? "Just use one tool" is easy to say. Here's what it means in practice.

You build the trip once, from your own products and suppliers, and that same data then drives everything else.

In TripCreator, you keep a product library: your hotels, transfers, guides and activities, each with its supplier and its rates. When you build a trip, you add products from that library to the days of the trip. You don't retype anything.

Because every product carries its price, the costing is already done and your markup is applied. The customer-facing itinerary is generated from the same trip, with day-by-day text, photos and maps, so it can't disagree with the costing. When the customer says yes, booking requests to suppliers come from that same trip. The payments and the invoice come from the same booking.

Now go back to Wednesday, when the customer asked to swap the second hotel for something by the sea. You change the hotel once. It changes in the costing, in the customer's itinerary and in what will be requested from the supplier. One change, in one place.

That's what ends price drift. There's no second copy left to drift.

And look at what happens to the hand-offs from our week. The enquiry becomes a trip. The costing, the proposal, the supplier requests and the invoice all come from that trip. Most of those ten to twenty hand-offs simply disappear, because there's nothing to copy between.

It's worth looking at this from the point of view of each person on a travel team, because the tax lands differently on each of them.

For sales, the change is speed. When the trip is built from products that already know their prices, a proposal that took half a day can take an hour. The time saved goes into the part of the job that wins bookings: understanding the customer and shaping the trip.

For operations, the change is trust. The trip they operate is exactly the trip that was sold, because it's the same record. They aren't working from a forwarded PDF and hoping it's the final version. Supplier requests come from the trip, and their status is tracked against it.

For finance, the change is fewer surprises. The invoice comes from the booking, and the booking comes from the trip. The amount the customer was quoted, the amount they're invoiced and the costs behind it all agree, because they're the same numbers.

And for management, the change is visibility. When every trip lives in one system, you can actually see the business: how many trips are quoted, how many are confirmed, what the margins look like, and where the work is piling up. With six tools, answering a simple question like "what's our margin on self-drive trips this year?" means a week of spreadsheet archaeology.

If you're thinking "our spreadsheet works, it's ugly but we know it, so why take on a migration?", that's a fair question. It's the right one to ask.

There are two answers. First, you don't have to move everything on day one. Most teams start with new enquiries and leave old trips where they are. The old trips finish in the old way, and the new ones start in the new way. Within a season, the old way has quietly run out.

It also helps to start small on the product side. You don't need to load every supplier you've ever used. Start with the twenty or thirty products you sell most often: your regular hotels, your standard transfers, your best excursions. Those cover most of your trips, and the rest can be added as they come up.

Second, getting your existing material in is far less painful than it used to be. The last two episodes of this series are about AI, and one of them covers a feature that reads your old itineraries and supplier documents and turns them into trips. So moving over is no longer a typing project. Hold me to that in episode nine.

Is this a problem for big operators or small ones? Both, in different ways.

A three-person team feels the tax as long evenings. The owner is often the one doing the copying, late at night, after a day of talking to customers. A fifty-person team feels it as errors and inconsistency, because everyone ends up with their own version of the spreadsheet, and no two proposals look quite the same.

It also looks different depending on what you sell. A DMC, a group operator and a self-drive specialist all pay the tax, but each pays it in a different way. The fix underneath is the same. What changes is which tools each of them leans on, and that's the next episode.

So far we've looked at the tax from the inside: your team's time, your margins, your knowledge. But your customers pay it too, and they're less forgiving than your team.

Think about what a customer actually experiences when a business is running on six tools. They send an enquiry and wait two days for a reply. The proposal arrives as an attachment. They ask for a change, and a new attachment arrives, and they're not sure which one is current. The confirmation email lists a slightly different hotel name from the proposal, because it was typed by someone else. The deposit invoice shows a different total from the one they agreed, because it was copied from an older version of the costing. And three weeks before departure, the vouchers arrive in four separate emails.

None of that is dramatic. But every small inconsistency chips away at the customer's confidence. They start to wonder whether the trip itself will be as disorganised as the paperwork. And customers who feel uncertain ask more questions, which brings more emails, which brings more work.

Now think about the same customer when the trip lives in one place. The reply comes the same day. The proposal is a page they can open on their phone. When they ask for a change, the page updates. The confirmation, the invoice and the vouchers all match the proposal, because they came from it. The customer never sees the machinery. They just feel that this company has its act together.

That feeling is worth a great deal. It's what turns a first booking into a second one, and a happy customer into a referral.

To make this concrete, let me tell you about two Tuesdays at the same imaginary company. Same team, same enquiry, same suppliers. The only difference is the way they work.

On the first Tuesday, the company runs on spreadsheets. An enquiry arrives at nine for a family of four, ten days in early July. The planner opens last summer's costing sheet for a similar trip and saves a copy. Half the rates are out of date, so she digs out this year's rate sheets from three supplier emails. By lunchtime the costing is done. After lunch she builds the proposal in a document, copying in the hotel descriptions from an old proposal and finding new photos for the two hotels she changed. At four o'clock, she sends it. Then she remembers she didn't update the child rate for one of the hotels. She fixes the costing, regenerates the document, and sends a second email saying "please use this version instead".

On the second Tuesday, the company runs on one system. The same enquiry arrives at nine. The planner copies last summer's family trip, which already has its days, hotels, descriptions and photos. She sets the dates and the travellers, and the prices update from the products, including this year's child rates. She swaps two hotels for ones the family will prefer, and their descriptions and photos come with them. She writes two sentences at the top of the trip about why she's chosen this route for a family. By half past ten, the family has a link.

Same planner, same skill, same suppliers. The difference is a day of her time, one avoided mistake, and a family that heard back before lunch instead of at the end of the day. Multiply that across every enquiry in a season, and you have the real cost of the spreadsheet tax, and the real value of removing it.

If you remember one thing from today, make it this. Count the tools behind one trip. Every time information moves between them by hand, you're paying the spreadsheet tax. Build the trip once, and let that one version drive the costing, the itinerary, the bookings and the invoice.

And here's a bit of homework, in two parts. First, pick a trip from last month and write down every tool it touched and every time information was copied between them. Second, do the rough arithmetic from earlier: hand-offs per trip, times minutes per hand-off, times trips per year. Then reply to the email this episode came with and tell me two things: your number, and the one tool you'd most like to stop using. We read every answer.

If you'd like to see what "build once" looks like, the link to see how it works is in the show notes.

Next time: one platform, many kinds of travel business. Which one are you?

I'm Eric. Thanks for listening.