One platform, many kinds of travel business

A DMC, a group operator and a self-drive specialist walk into the same software. Usually, two of them walk straight back out.

I'm Eric, from TripCreator. Last episode was about the spreadsheet tax: the cost of moving the same trip between five or six tools by hand. If you did the homework, you'll have a rough number for what that costs your business each year.

Today's question is who TripCreator is actually for. Travel isn't one business. It's many very different businesses that happen to use the same hotels. By the end of this episode, you should be able to place your own business on the map, and you'll know which of the next five episodes are most relevant to you.

Most travel software suits one kind of company, because it's built around one shape of trip.

Tour operator software assumes you sell the same product many times. It's great at departures and poor at a one-off honeymoon. Bespoke tools assume every trip is unique, so they struggle when you have a 40-person group on a fixed date with a rooming list. And booking engines are good at taking money for something that already exists, but they rarely help you build it in the first place.

None of those designs is wrong. Each one is a sensible answer to one shape of business. The trouble starts when your business has more than one shape, which, as we'll see, is almost always.

Let me describe a pattern I've seen many times. I'll keep it general, because it happens to so many companies.

A small operator starts out doing one thing well. Let's say tailor-made trips for couples. They pick a tool built for bespoke travel, and it works. A few years in, a partner agency asks them to handle a group of thirty. They say yes, because it's good business. The bespoke tool can't do rooming lists or group pricing, so the group is run in a spreadsheet.

The group goes well, so the agency sends more. Now there's a group business living in spreadsheets next to the bespoke business in its proper tool. Then the operator decides to run a fixed-date departure every month, because the groups showed there's demand. That doesn't fit either system, so it gets a third set of spreadsheets and perhaps a booking plugin on the website.

Five years in, the company has three businesses, three ways of working, three sets of supplier rates that don't agree, and a team where only certain people can handle certain kinds of trip. Nobody chose that. It grew sideways, one sensible decision at a time.

That's the real cost of single-lane software. It isn't that the tool is bad. It's that the business outgrows it sideways, and the gaps get filled with spreadsheets. And then we're back to the spreadsheet tax.

Here are the six kinds of business that use TripCreator. I'll sketch each one now, including the moment where their day usually goes wrong, and the next five episodes take them one at a time.

First, DMCs and MICE. These are ground handlers who build programmes for agents, plus incentives and conferences. Their life is net rates, group sizes and the agent's deadline. Their day goes wrong when an agent asks for three options, priced for three group sizes, by Friday, and then changes one hotel on Thursday.

Second, FIT, luxury and bespoke. Tailor-made trips where every proposal is different. For these businesses, presentation sells. The proposal is the product. Their day goes wrong when a beautiful proposal goes out as a PDF, the guest asks for a change, and the seventh version of the file is suddenly out of date.

Third, group travel, SIC and series. SIC means seat-in-coach. This is fixed departures, allotments of rooms and seats, rooming lists and per-seat pricing. The challenge is selling one trip many times. Their day goes wrong when one hotel changes and the change has to be made across twenty-four departures by hand.

Fourth, self-drive and multi-day tours. Routes, daily driving legs, car hire, and a guest who is on their own once they land. Their itinerary has to work as a guidebook. Their day goes wrong at eight in the morning, when a guest in a car park can't find today's directions.

Fifth, OTAs, agencies and tour operators. They sell their own products and other people's, so commission and markup matter a great deal, and so does the agent's own brand. Their day goes wrong when the margin on a mixed trip is only worked out at the end of the month, and it turns out to be thinner than anyone thought.

And sixth, multi-brand groups. Companies with several brands or offices under one roof. Each brand wants to keep its own identity while sharing suppliers and content behind the scenes. Their day goes wrong when the same hotel has four different rates in four different systems, and nobody knows which one is right.

In my experience, almost no operator fits neatly into one of those boxes. Most are two or three. A DMC that also runs a few scheduled departures. A self-drive specialist that does bespoke honeymoons on the side. An agency with its own small tour programme. A bespoke operator, like the one in my story, that ends up with groups and series as well.

That's exactly when single-lane software hurts. The minute you add a second kind of trip, you add a second tool. So the design question for us was simple: what's shared across all six, and what's specific to each?

Five things are shared.

A product library: your suppliers, hotels, activities and transfers, with their rates. A trip planner, where you build a trip day by day from that library. Pricing and markup, so the selling price is worked out from your cost. A customer itinerary, which is the page the guest or agent actually sees. And bookings and payments.

Every one of the six needs all five. A DMC and a self-drive operator both need to store a hotel, price it, put it on a day and send it to someone. What differs is which tools sit on top of that core.

Here's an example that shows why the shared core matters so much.

Imagine a well-located hotel that you've worked with for years. You load it into your product library once, with its rates, its seasons and its room types.

On Monday, that hotel appears in a DMC programme for an agent's incentive group of forty, priced net, under the agent's brand. On Tuesday, it appears in a bespoke honeymoon proposal, presented as a live itinerary page with photos and a suite upgrade the couple can choose for themselves. On Wednesday, it's night three of a series departure that runs every Saturday, with an allotment of twelve rooms held against each date. And on Thursday, it's an overnight stop in a self-drive package sold on your website.

Four very different trips, sold four different ways, to four different kinds of customer. But it's one hotel record. When the hotel sends you next year's rates, you update them once, and all four kinds of trip use the new rates from then on.

Compare that with the company that grew sideways. They'd have that hotel in three or four places, with rates that slowly drift apart. Every rate update is a small project, and somebody always misses one.

Now, what sits on top of the core? Here's what each segment leans on.

The DMC leans on pricing for several group sizes, net and gross views for agents, and white-label proposals. The bespoke seller leans on presentation: the live itinerary page, optional extras the guest picks, and translations. The series operator leans on departures, allotments and the availability view. The self-drive operator leans on routes, maps and the guest's phone. Agencies lean on commission, agent shopfronts and the CRM. And multi-brand groups lean on shared libraries and permissions across their workspaces.

All of that is in the same product. You use the parts your business needs. A self-drive operator never has to think about rooming lists until they start running groups. And when they do, the tools are already there.

That's a big part of the point: room to grow into a second kind of trip without changing system. The company in my story wouldn't have needed three ways of working. They'd have used more of the same tool.

If you're wondering whether this applies to you, here are five signs that a business has grown sideways and its tools haven't kept up. See how many you recognise.

One. Certain kinds of trip can only be handled by certain people, because only they know which spreadsheet to use.

Two. The same supplier has different rates in different places, and you've been caught out by an old rate at least once this year.

Three. Your proposals look different depending on what kind of trip they are, or who on the team wrote them.

Four. Answering a simple question about the business, like how many groups you ran last year and what they made, takes days rather than minutes.

Five. When you think about adding a new kind of product, the first worry is "how would we even manage that?" rather than "would customers buy it?"

If you recognised two or more, you're paying a version of the spreadsheet tax that comes from growth. It's a good problem to have, because it means the business is expanding. But it's still a tax.

The next five episodes are one segment each. Episode three is DMCs and MICE. Four is bespoke and luxury. Five is series departures. Six is self-drive. Seven is agencies and multi-brand groups. Then episode eight covers selling online, and episodes nine and ten are about the AI.

If you only care about one segment, the email that came with this episode has a button for each. Click yours and we'll make sure you get that one.

My suggestion, though: listen to at least one segment that isn't yours. Very often the tool that solves your problem was built for someone else's. A bespoke operator might find the answer to their deposit headaches in the selling-online episode. A DMC might find that the series tools are exactly what they need for the departures they've started running.

Not sure which you are? Ask yourself three questions.

Do you sell the same trip many times, or a new trip each time? If it's many times, you're a series business. If it's a new trip each time, you're bespoke or a DMC.

Who receives your proposal, a guest or an agent? If it's an agent, you're a DMC or a wholesaler at heart. If it's a guest, presentation matters most.

Is the guest escorted, or on their own? If they're on their own, self-drive matters to you, because your itinerary is their guide.

And if your answer to all three is "both", you're like most of our customers, and you're in the right place.

Let me answer three questions that usually come up at this stage of the conversation.

The first is: "If it does everything, won't it be complicated?" It's a fair worry. The answer is that you only see and use what your business needs. A self-drive operator works mainly with routes, products and the guest's itinerary. The series tools are there, but they don't get in the way until you need them.

The second is: "We're small. Is this built for big operators?" No. The shared core is the same whether you're three people or fifty. Smaller teams often feel the benefit sooner, because the person doing the copying is usually the owner.

The third is: "We're very specialised. Our trips are unusual." Most operators feel that way, and they're often right that their trips are unusual. But the building blocks usually aren't. A fishing lodge, a polar expedition and a wine tour all come down to products, days, prices, capacity and a customer who needs to know what's happening. The details are yours. The structure underneath is shared.

Let's go back to the company from my story, the one that grew sideways into bespoke trips, groups and monthly departures. Imagine they bring all three businesses onto one shared core. What actually changes for the people?

The first change is that people stop being specialists in a system and become specialists in travel. Before, only two people could handle groups, because only they understood the group spreadsheet. Now anyone on the team can open a group, see its departures and rooming, and answer a question. The two group experts are still the experts, but they're no longer the only ones who can help a customer on a busy afternoon.

The second change is that knowledge stops leaking. A great description of a lodge, written once for a honeymoon proposal, is now available to the person building a group programme that uses the same lodge. The best photos, the best supplier notes and the best day descriptions all live on the products, so they spread through the business on their own.

The third change is that holidays become possible. That sounds like a joke, but it isn't. In a business where each kind of trip lives in one person's spreadsheet, that person can't really switch off. When everything lives in one place, a colleague can pick up where they left off.

And the fourth change is that management gets a single view. How many trips of each kind did we quote this month? How many confirmed? Which kind of business is growing, and which is flat? When the businesses live in separate tools, those questions take days. On one core, they're a few clicks.

Whether or not you choose TripCreator, here are five questions I'd ask any travel software before committing to it. They come straight out of the problems we've talked about today.

One. What happens when we add a second kind of trip? If the answer is "you'd need our other product" or "you could use a spreadsheet for that", you're looking at a single-lane system.

Two. Where do supplier rates live, and how many times do we enter them? The right answer is once. If the same hotel has to be entered separately for different kinds of trip, the rates will drift.

Three. What does our customer actually see? Ask to see a proposal on a phone, the way your customers will open it. Not a screenshot on a big monitor, a real phone.

Four. What happens after the customer says yes? Many tools are good at quoting and then hand you a PDF. Ask how bookings, supplier requests, vouchers, payments and invoices connect to the trip you quoted.

Five. How do we get our existing material in? Years of itineraries and supplier documents are a huge asset. If the only answer is "type them in", the migration will be painful and slow.

Those five questions will tell you a lot about any system, including ours. And if you'd like us to answer them for your business specifically, that's exactly what a discovery call is for.

Here's the one thing to take away. Travel businesses are different on top and the same underneath. Build on a shared core, use the tools your segment needs, and you won't need a second system when you add a second kind of trip.

And if your business has already grown sideways, that's normal. It just means it's time to bring the pieces back together.

If you're still not sure which you are, reply to the email and tell us what you sell. We'll point you to the right examples. The links are in the show notes.

Next time: DMCs and MICE, and the agent who wants three options by Friday.

I'm Eric. See you then.