CS-01 · Travel
Cutting a tour operator's quote time from 25 minutes to 3
The transferable point
When a process is slow, the cause is usually that a decision has never been made, and every person is making it individually every time. Software forces the decision. That is most of the value.
The situation
A tour operator selling tailor-made itineraries across four countries. Twelve staff, growing, and every quote assembled by hand — a consultant opening a supplier rate sheet, a currency converter, last year's similar itinerary, and a Word template, then typing it all into an email.
The problem
Twenty-five minutes of a senior consultant's time per quote, and roughly sixty quotes a week. That is twenty-five hours a week of skilled staff doing arithmetic. Worse, the delay meant enquiries received on a Friday afternoon were being answered on Monday, by which point a meaningful share had booked with someone faster.
What we found
The bottleneck was not typing speed. It was that pricing knowledge lived in people rather than in a system — supplier rates in one person's rate sheet, margin rules in another person's head, and no agreement on which exchange rate applied at which point. Two consultants quoting the same trip produced different numbers, and neither was wrong by the rules they were each following.
So the first job was not software. It was getting three people in a room to agree what the margin rules actually were.
What we built
A quoting system built around the components an itinerary is made of, rather than around a document template.
Supplier rates were loaded with validity periods and currency, so a rate that expired stopped being used rather than quietly producing a loss. Margin rules were expressed once, in one place, with the ability to override on a specific quote — and an audit line recording who overrode it and why.
Exchange rates are fixed at the point of quote issue and held for the quote's validity window, which removed an argument that had been happening monthly between operations and finance.
The output is a branded itinerary document generated from the same data, so the number in the email and the number in the system cannot drift apart. Consultants build a quote from components in a few minutes, and the parts that used to be retyped are simply reused.
The result
Quote turnaround fell from around twenty-five minutes to about three. Friday enquiries started being answered on Friday. The operations manager stopped rebuilding a margin report by hand every month, because the data was now in a shape that could produce it.
The thing I did not expect was how much of it was us not agreeing with each other. Fixing that was worth more than the software.
If your team is assembling quotes by hand, the arithmetic is rarely the real cost. Ask us for an audit.
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Tell us what the system has to do.
Describe the problem in a paragraph and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it — and roughly what it costs before you spend anything.