DMCs and MICE, three options by Friday

It's Tuesday afternoon. An agent emails a brief: 28 people, six nights, mid-May. They want three options by Friday. The group might grow, so price it for 20, for 30 and for 40. Net prices, in euros, and nothing with your name on it, because the agent is presenting it as their own.

If you run a DMC, you've had that email this month. Possibly this week.

I'm Eric, from TripCreator. This is episode three, and the first of five episodes that each focus on one kind of travel business. Today it's destination management companies, plus the MICE side of that world: meetings, incentives, conferences and events.

Here's the plan for the next twenty minutes. First, why DMC work is hard in a very specific way. Then a walk through that Tuesday brief, step by step, the way it works in TripCreator. Then the mistakes DMCs most often make with group pricing, what changes after confirmation, and the questions DMC owners usually ask.

The hard part of DMC work isn't the destination knowledge. You already have that. You know which hotel has the best rooms on the third floor and which guide makes a group laugh. The hard part is the arithmetic and the admin around it.

Think about that Tuesday brief. Three options means three different combinations of hotels and activities. Three group sizes means each option has to be priced three times, because a coach costs the same for 20 people as for 30, while the per-person price changes completely. Then the agent's currency is different from your suppliers' currencies. And the agent needs a document that looks like theirs, not yours.

In a spreadsheet, that's nine pricing scenarios, a currency column, and a proposal document built by hand three times. And on Thursday the agent writes back: "Can you swap the hotel in option B?"

That's the DMC's version of the spreadsheet tax from episode one. It's paid in evenings, and it's paid in risk, because nine pricing scenarios built by hand means nine places for a formula to go wrong.

In TripCreator, it starts with your product library. Your hotels, transfers, guides, restaurants and activities live there with their net rates. That includes seasons, child rates and single-room rules.

When you build a programme, you add products from that library to the days of the trip. You aren't typing a hotel name and a price. You're choosing a product that already knows its price for those dates.

This matters most on the third option, and on the hundredth programme of the year. The work you put into loading a supplier's rates once is reused every time you quote that supplier. Over a season, that adds up to a lot of evenings back.

Let's walk through the Tuesday brief properly, the way it actually goes in TripCreator.

Step one: you start the programme. Often you won't start from a blank page. If you've run a similar six-night programme before, you copy it and adjust, so the day structure, the descriptions and the photos are already there.

Step two: you lay out option A. Six nights, two hotels, airport transfers, a guided city day, a coastal excursion, a welcome dinner and a farewell dinner. Each one is a product from your library, placed on its day. The descriptions the agent's client will read come with the products, so you aren't writing them from scratch.

Step three: you set the group sizes. You quote three brackets, say 20, 30 and 40 travellers. TripCreator prices option A at each size from the same products. You look at the numbers and sanity-check them: does the per-person price fall the way you'd expect as the group grows?

Step four: options B and C. You copy option A and change what's different. Option B swaps the second hotel for a smaller boutique property. Option C replaces the coastal excursion with a wine estate visit. Each option is priced at all three group sizes automatically.

Step five: you check the currency and the view. The agent buys in euros, so the proposal shows euros. They want net prices, so that's what they see. Your own markup is already in, so your margin is visible to you and invisible to them.

Step six: you send it, under the agent's branding. Three saved versions, three links, one email.

It's Wednesday morning. You've answered a Friday deadline two days early. And on Thursday, when the agent asks to swap the hotel in option B, you change one product in one version and send the updated link. Ten minutes, not an afternoon.

Let me spend a moment longer on group sizes, because it's where DMC quotes most often go wrong.

In TripCreator you can quote several group-size brackets in one proposal, for example 10 to 19 people, 20 to 29, and 30 and over. Each bracket is priced from the same products.

Shared costs like the coach and the guide are divided across the group, while per-person costs like meals and entry tickets stay per person. You don't keep three spreadsheets. You keep one programme that knows how to price itself at different sizes.

When the agent asks "what if it's 35?", you already have the answer.

While we're on group pricing, here are three mistakes I see DMCs make again and again. None of them is about the software. They're about the habits a spreadsheet encourages.

The first mistake is treating shared costs as per-person costs. Someone takes the coach price for a group of 30, divides it by 30, and puts that per-person figure into the costing. It's correct for 30. Then the group shrinks to 22, nobody re-does the division, and the coach is suddenly under-recovered. When shared and per-person costs are kept separate in the programme, the numbers stay right as the group size moves.

The second mistake is quoting one group size and hoping. The agent says "around 28", so the DMC prices for 28. The final number is 19, and the per-person price no longer covers the costs. Quoting brackets from the start protects you, and it also looks more professional to the agent.

The third mistake is forgetting that the currency moves. You quote in euros, your suppliers charge in another currency, and three weeks pass between quote and confirmation. If the exchange rate moves against you, the margin you thought you had isn't there anymore. Which brings us to currency.

The money question every DMC lives with is net or gross, and in what currency.

You can show the agent net prices, or gross prices with their commission included. Behind the scenes your own markup is applied, so you always know your margin.

On currency, your suppliers might charge in one currency while the agent buys in another. Exchange rates are locked when you quote. That means the margin you saw when you sent the proposal is still the margin when the agent confirms. Currency movement between Tuesday and confirmation doesn't quietly eat into it.

Now to the three options, and Thursday's "can you swap the hotel?"

In TripCreator, option A, option B and option C are saved versions of the programme, and each has its own link. When you change option B, you save a new version. The agent always knows which one they're looking at.

This matters more than it sounds. Agents forward things. When an agent sends version two to their client, the client must see version two, not whatever you happen to be editing that afternoon. Saved versions make sure of that. And months later, when someone asks "what exactly did we quote in March?", the answer is still there.

The agent doesn't want your name on the proposal. They're presenting it to their client as their own work, and that's the deal.

So the itinerary can go out under the agent's branding, with their logo and colours, or with no branding at all. It's still a proper day-by-day itinerary with photos and descriptions. It just doesn't say who built it.

For many agents, this is the difference between a DMC they tolerate and a DMC they love. A proposal they can forward straight to their client, without reformatting, saves them an afternoon too.

Now the agent confirms. In a lot of DMCs, this is where the second job starts: emailing every supplier, chasing confirmations and building vouchers.

In TripCreator, the confirmed programme is the operational record. You send booking requests to suppliers straight from the trip and track each one's status as it comes back. You can see at a glance which suppliers have confirmed and which you still need to chase. You issue vouchers from the same data, and send guides and drivers their own links with what they need for each day.

So the trip you quoted is the trip you operate. If the hotel changes after confirmation, it changes in one place, and the supplier requests, vouchers and guide links follow.

Most DMCs don't work with one agent. They work with dozens, in several countries, and each one has its own habits.

That's where it helps that the CRM in TripCreator is tied to the trips. Each agent is a company with its contacts, and every programme you've quoted for them, won or lost, is linked to that company. When an agent you haven't heard from in a year sends a brief, you can see what you sent them last time, what they confirmed, and what they turned down.

That history is valuable. It tells you what an agent's clients tend to like, what price level works for them, and how often their quotes turn into bookings. In the spreadsheet world, that knowledge lives in someone's inbox.

A word for those of you doing MICE: meetings, incentives, conferences and events.

An incentive programme is a DMC programme with more moving parts. There are venues, gala dinners, breakout activities where the group splits three ways, and a rooming list that changes until the week before.

The same itinerary holds all of it. The event pieces sit on the days alongside the hotels and transfers. The group-size pricing works the same way. And the rooming list belongs to the trip, not to a separate spreadsheet.

The breakout day is a good example. Forty people, three activities, and the split isn't decided until two weeks before. When each activity is a product on that day, priced per person, changing the split changes the price without anyone rebuilding the costing.

Let me answer the questions DMC owners most often ask at this point.

"Can I reuse last year's programmes?" Yes. Copy a past programme and adjust it. That's usually the fastest way to build a new quote, because the structure, the descriptions and the photos are already done.

"What happens when a supplier sends new rates?" You update the product in your library once. New quotes use the new rates. A version you've already sent stays as it was sent, so you're never surprised by a quote that changed itself.

"Will my agents need to learn a new system?" No. They receive a link to a well-presented itinerary under their own branding, which they can open and forward. That's all they need.

"How long until we're quoting in it?" It depends mainly on how many products you load first. A sensible start is your most-used hotels, transfers and excursions. Most of your programmes are built from a fairly small set of regulars, and the rest can be added as they come up. Episode nine covers how AI import can speed that up by reading your existing supplier documents.

Speed is only half of a DMC's edge. The other half is accuracy, because an agent who catches one wrong price starts double-checking everything you send. So here's a short routine for checking a group quote before it leaves the building. It takes five minutes, and it catches most of the mistakes that cost DMCs money.

First, read the programme as the client would. Open the itinerary page, not the costing, and read it from top to bottom. Does every day make sense? Is anything missing, like a transfer between the airport and the first hotel, or a lunch on the long excursion day?

Second, check each group size against your instinct. You know roughly what a six-night programme like this should cost per person. If the price for 20 people looks too low, or the price for 40 isn't much lower than the price for 30, something is probably set up wrong. Look again at which costs are shared and which are per person.

Third, check the dates against the seasons. Mid-May might straddle two hotel seasons. Make sure the rates on each night are the rates for that night.

Fourth, check the inclusions. If the programme says "all entrance fees included", make sure each entrance fee is actually on its day. A promise in the text that isn't in the costing is a cost you'll pay yourself.

And fifth, check what the agent will see. Net or gross, the right currency, and the agent's branding rather than yours.

The reason this routine is quick in TripCreator is that you're checking one thing, not three. The page the agent sees and the costing behind it are the same trip, so if the page is right and the numbers make sense, the quote is right.

Let me describe what high season looks like for a DMC that has made this switch, because the benefits compound when you're busy.

Imagine it's March, and briefs for the summer are arriving from thirty different agents in a dozen countries. Some are new programmes. Some are repeats of last year's with small changes. Some are agents chasing quotes they asked for last week.

The repeats are the easy wins. You find last year's programme for that agent in the CRM, copy it, update the dates, and this year's rates come through from your products. A quote that used to take an afternoon takes twenty minutes.

The new programmes start from your best similar programme rather than a blank page. Your team spends its time on the parts that are genuinely new.

The chasers are handled from the CRM, where you can see every open quote for that agent and which version they last received.

And as confirmations come in, operations starts work from the same programmes, sending booking requests and tracking supplier confirmations, while sales carries on quoting. Nobody is waiting for a spreadsheet to be handed over.

By the end of the season, you've quoted more programmes with the same team, the agents have heard back faster, and your margins are what you meant them to be. That's what speed and accuracy look like together.

So here's today's takeaway. A DMC's edge is speed and accuracy on complicated quotes. Store your supplier rates once. Price every group size from the same programme, with shared costs kept separate. Lock the currency at quote time. Keep every version, and send it under the agent's brand. Then operate the trip you quoted, from the same place, and keep each agent's history where you can see it.

If the Tuesday brief can be answered on Wednesday morning instead of Friday afternoon, you win more of them.

If you'd like to see what a DMC programme looks like in TripCreator, there's an example itinerary in the show notes, and a link to book a demonstration where we'll build one live.

And if you already have a pricing spreadsheet you trust, episode nine covers how the AI can turn your supplier quotes and old programmes into trips.

Next time: bespoke and luxury travel, where the proposal is the product.

I'm Eric. Thanks for listening.