How to organize rates and markup by market

Why pricing errors are usually version errors

In a DMC, travel agency or tour operator, the most common pricing mistake is not a calculation error; it is a version error. There is one spreadsheet per market, another per rate period, and every quote uses whichever file someone had open.

When two people quote the same service from two different files, the client receives two prices, and the difference usually comes out of your margin.

What you load, and where

Each cost is loaded once, next to the product it belongs to, with its dates (from and to), its currency and its rate type:

• Hotels: the cost of each room, per period.
• Services, excursions and transfers: the cost per supplier, per period. A transfer is a service priced per vehicle; there is no separate transfer product.
• Tours and circuits: rates per departure for tours, and per passenger for circuits by single, double and triple.

How a rate is charged

Room prices are entered per person; the per-room option divides the room price by the capacity of the room type. Services are priced per passenger, with bands of passengers, or per vehicle. Day-of-week rules apply to hotel costs.

Every cost carries its own currency. The exchange rates table holds the rates between currencies, and a file can use its own exchange rate.

Markup is a factor, not a percentage

In Beglobber the selling price is the cost divided by the markup. With a cost of 142.00 and a markup of 0.82 the sale is 173.17, and a lower factor leaves more margin.

Where markup is set

Markup can live at several levels, and the file brings them together:

• By market: by service type and by hotel category, plus a general markup for the market.
• By room, and on tours and circuits, each of which can carry its own markup.
• In the file: the markup is pre-filled from the agency's markup or, if it has none, from the market's general markup, and it can be edited while the file is a quote.
• In the online portal, each agency's markup and commission apply automatically, and the agency sees only the sell price.

What you see in every file

Each file shows cost, sale and profit per currency, and the profit as a percentage. A pricing mistake is visible while you quote, not after the booking is confirmed.

What happens when a date has no rate

A date with no rate is priced at zero and flagged. Hotel lists show how many hotels have no valid rate, the quote PDF marks the line as having no rate, and copying a quote tells you how many items were left at zero. In the online builder, a line without a rate cannot be saved until you change it.