Agencies and multi-brand groups

Here's a trip an agency might sell on an ordinary Monday. Four nights of your own walking tour. Two nights in a hotel you resell from a partner. An excursion booked through a booking platform. A transfer you buy from a local operator. Four sources, four sets of terms, and some combination of commission and markup on each one.

Now work out the margin. Quickly, please. The customer's waiting.

I'm Eric, from TripCreator. This is episode seven, the last of our segment episodes. It's for agencies, OTAs and tour operators who sell a mix of their own products and other people's, and for groups that run more than one travel brand.

Over the next twenty minutes I'll cover why the middle of the travel chain is such a hard place to keep margins visible, walk through that Monday trip line by line, explain commission and markup in plain words, and then spend real time on the multi-brand question: how to share what should be shared without merging what should stay separate.

Agencies and tour operators sit in the middle of the travel chain. You sell your own trips. You resell other operators' products. You pay commission to some partners and earn commission from others. Sometimes you sell through agents, and sometimes you are the agent.

In most setups, each of those is a separate workflow. Your own trips live in one system. Resold products are quoted from a supplier's website. Commission is worked out in a spreadsheet at the end of the month. And the margin on any one trip is something you find out after the fact, not something you can see while you're quoting.

In TripCreator, those are one workflow. Here's how.

It starts with mixing sources in one trip. Your own products sit in your product library. Alongside them, you can add products from connected suppliers and booking platforms, all in the same itinerary.

The important part is that margin and commission are worked out per line. Each product carries its own cost and its own terms, and TripCreator works out each line on its own terms and adds them up. So the trip's margin is visible while you're still building it.

Let's go back to the Monday trip and build it.

Line one: four nights of your own walking tour. It's your product, so you know its cost exactly, and your markup is applied on top.

Line two: two nights in a partner's hotel. You have a net rate from the partner, and your markup goes on top of that.

Line three: an excursion from a booking platform. Here the terms might be different. You might sell at the platform's price and earn a commission, rather than adding a markup.

Line four: a transfer from a local operator, at their net price, with your markup on top.

Four lines, three different commercial models. In a spreadsheet, someone has to remember which model applies to which line, and get the formula right each time. In TripCreator, each line knows its own terms, so the total margin on the trip is simply there.

Now the customer asks for a nicer hotel. You swap line two, and you immediately see what it does to the margin. If the nicer hotel leaves you almost nothing, you see it before you send the quote, not at the end of the month. You might suggest a different hotel, or adjust your markup on purpose rather than by accident.

Since commission and markup cause so much confusion, let me put them in plain words.

Markup is when you start from a cost and add something on top. You buy a hotel night at a net price of 100, add your markup, and sell it for 125. Your margin is the 25.

Commission is when you start from a selling price and get a share of it. A platform sells an excursion for 100 and pays you 15% for selling it. Your margin is the 15.

When you sell through agents, it works the other way round. You might show an agent a gross price that includes their commission, or a net price they add their own markup to.

None of these models is better than the others. The danger is mixing them up in the same trip, in someone's head, under time pressure. That's where margins quietly disappear. When each line carries its own model, nobody has to remember.

If you work with agents who sell your trips, there's a tool built for them: agent shopfronts.

Each agent can have their own branded storefront for your trips. They sell under their own brand, to their own customers, and the trips and the prices come from you. You see which agent sold what, so commission is tracked from the start rather than reconstructed later.

For the agent, it means they can sell your product without building anything. For you, it means a sales channel that scales without your team rebuilding proposals in each agent's style.

Markup deserves its own moment, because it's where agencies tend to lose money quietly.

In TripCreator you set markups at the level that makes sense for your business: per product, per category or per trip. Agents see net prices, and guests see the selling price. Nobody does the maths by hand, so nobody forgets to apply the markup to that one transfer at 6pm on a Friday.

The next piece is the CRM. Most agencies have one, and most CRMs don't know anything about trips. They know contacts and deals, and the actual itineraries live somewhere else.

In TripCreator, the CRM is connected to the trips. Companies and contacts are linked to every itinerary, quote and booking they're involved in. So when a regular client calls, you see their history: what they've travelled on, what they were quoted and didn't book, and what's coming up. When an agent partner calls, you see everything they've sold.

Then there's the back office. Invoices and payments come from the bookings in TripCreator, and they flow to your accounting system instead of being typed in again.

That's the spreadsheet tax from episode one again, in its most expensive place: finance. Every number typed twice is a number that can be wrong twice.

Before we move to multi-brand groups, here are three ways I see agencies lose margin without noticing.

The first is discovering the margin at month-end. If you only find out what a trip made after it's been sold, you can't do anything about it. Seeing the margin while you quote turns it into a decision.

The second is inconsistent markup. Two colleagues quote the same trip, and one adds 20% while the other adds 15%, because each is working from their own habits. A markup set at the right level, per product or category, makes every quote consistent.

The third is untracked agent sales. When agent bookings arrive by email and get re-keyed, commission gets calculated late and sometimes wrongly. When agents sell through their own shopfront, every sale is attributed from the start.

Now to the multi-brand groups. Some of you run several travel brands under one company. Maybe a luxury brand and an adventure brand, or a brand per market, or a group made up of companies that were acquired over the years.

The usual choice is painful. Either every brand runs its own system, and nothing is shared, or everything is merged into one system, and the brands lose their identity.

In TripCreator, you group the brands into one organisation. Each brand keeps its own workspace, its own branding and its own team. Behind the scenes, you choose what's shared: suppliers, products, the CRM.

Let me make that concrete. Imagine a group with two brands: a luxury brand selling tailor-made trips, and an adventure brand selling small-group departures.

Both brands use the same mountain lodge. In the old world, each brand has its own copy of the lodge, with its own rates, loaded by its own team. When the lodge sends next year's rates, two people update two systems, and one of them is usually late.

In TripCreator, the lodge is loaded once and shared with both brands. The luxury brand's proposals show it in their own style, under their own logo. The adventure brand's departures use it on night four. When the rates change, they change once.

Meanwhile, each brand's team only sees what's relevant to them. The luxury team doesn't wade through adventure departures, and the adventure team doesn't see luxury proposals. But someone at group level can see across both brands: how much business the lodge gets from the group as a whole, which is very useful when it's time to negotiate next year's rates.

That brings us to permissions, which matter more in a group than anywhere else.

Permissions in TripCreator are fine-grained. A team member in one brand sees what they need and can change only what they should. Someone in finance might see bookings and invoices across brands without being able to edit itineraries. A product manager might maintain the shared supplier library without seeing individual customer bookings.

The point isn't to lock people out. It's that a group can share a lot behind the scenes without everyone being able to change everything.

One more thing for agencies and groups with technical teams. TripCreator has a public API. If you have a developer, they can connect your website or back-office systems directly to your trips. That might mean showing products on your own site, or pulling bookings into a reporting tool.

You don't need it to use TripCreator, but it's there when you outgrow the standard screens.

Here are the questions agencies and groups usually ask.

"Can we keep our existing brands exactly as they are?" Yes. Each brand keeps its own workspace and branding. Customers of one brand never see another.

"Do we have to share everything between brands?" No. You choose what's shared. Some groups share suppliers but keep CRMs separate. Others share almost everything. It's your decision, and you can change it.

"Can agents see our net rates?" They see the prices you choose to show them. Net to the agent, gross with their commission, or a selling price, depending on how you work with them.

"We sell lots of other people's products. Does it still work?" Yes. That's exactly the mixed-trip case we walked through. Your products and your partners' products sit side by side in one trip, each on its own commercial terms.

For many tour operators, agents are the biggest growth opportunity they're not fully using. Let me spend a few minutes on how to grow an agent network without growing your workload at the same rate.

The traditional model goes like this. An agent finds a trip they like on your website. They email you for availability and prices. You reply. They come back with their client's dates. You check availability again and send a quote. The client says yes, the agent emails you the names, and someone on your team types in the booking. Every agent sale costs you several emails and some manual work, so each new agent adds to your team's workload.

With agent shopfronts, the model changes. The agent has their own branded storefront showing your trips, with live availability and the prices you've set for them. They can answer their own client's questions without emailing you. When the client decides, the booking comes in, attributed to that agent, from the same allotment as everything else.

That changes the economics of adding an agent. Instead of every new agent meaning more emails, a new agent mostly means more sales. Your team's time goes into the relationships: training agents on your trips, helping them sell the trickier ones, and visiting the ones who sell the most.

Here are three tips for growing the network well.

Start with your best few agents. Get the shopfront working well for them, and learn what questions they still ask. Then fix the answers in your trip content.

Make your trip pages sell on their own. An agent can only sell what they understand. Clear descriptions, honest inclusions and good photos turn your shopfront into a sales tool the agent is proud to use.

And look at the numbers. Because every booking records which agent sold it, you can see who sells what, which trips sell best through agents, and which agents need more support.

Let's talk about the end of the month, because that's where agencies feel the spreadsheet tax most painfully.

In a typical agency, month-end looks like this. Someone exports bookings from one system, payments from another, and commission from a spreadsheet. They try to match them up. Some bookings were changed after they were invoiced. Some payments arrived without a clear reference. Some agent commissions were agreed by email and never recorded. It takes days, and the answer is never quite certain.

When bookings, invoices and payments all come from the same trips, month-end gets much simpler. Each booking knows its invoice. Each invoice knows its payments. Each agent sale knows its agent. The margin on each trip was visible when it was quoted, and it's still visible now. And when invoices and payments flow into your accounting system, finance isn't re-typing them.

Finance teams that make this switch often describe the change in one word: boring. Month-end becomes a check rather than an investigation, and that's exactly what it should be.

Finally, for multi-brand groups, here's what the first month typically looks like when brands move onto one platform. It's a useful way to set expectations.

In the first week, you decide what's shared. Most groups start by sharing their supplier and product library, because that's where duplication hurts most, and keep each brand's customers separate.

In the second week, you clean up the overlap. The same hotel probably exists in three versions across three brands. You agree on one, with the right rates, and retire the others.

In the third week, each brand starts quoting new enquiries on the platform, with its own branding and its own team, using the shared library.

And by the fourth week, people start noticing the benefits. A product manager updates a supplier's rates once and every brand uses them. A brand manager borrows a great description written by another brand's team. And group management sees, often for the first time, the combined business each supplier gets from the whole group.

The brands still look and feel exactly as they did to their customers. What changed is everything behind the scenes.

Today's takeaway: when you sit in the middle, the margin is the business. Mix your own products and your partners' in one trip, with margin and commission worked out per line. Give your agents a shopfront of their own. Keep markups systematic. Connect your CRM to the actual trips and your accounting to the actual bookings. And if you run several brands, share what should be shared and keep separate what should stay separate.

Agency and multi-brand setups vary more than any other segment, so this is the one where a conversation helps most. The link to book a demonstration is in the show notes.

That's the end of our segment episodes. Next time we move from who TripCreator is for to what it does. We start with selling online: let them book at 11pm.

I'm Eric. Thanks for listening.