CRM ROI Calculator for Travel: Value the Itineraries Nobody Followed Up

The leak is an itinerary that cost two hours and got one message

A custom itinerary is the most expensive thing a travel consultant produces. It takes hotel research, supplier rates, sequencing and formatting, and it is frequently sent with a single line of covering text and then left alone. The traveller, meanwhile, is comparing three proposals and waiting for someone to answer the question they did not ask. Very few leisure enquiries are lost on price; a great many are lost on silence.

The second leak is last season's traveller

Families travel on a rhythm: school holidays, festival breaks, an annual trip in the same month each year. A traveller who booked with you last summer is the most qualified enquiry you will see this summer, and in most agencies they are contacted only if they happen to write in first.

Five. Monthly enquiries across every channel, counted honestly including WhatsApp messages that never became a file. Itinerary coverage, meaning the share of enquiries that actually received a proposal. Itinerary-to-booking conversion. Net margin per booking after supplier cost. And the number of consultants and operations staff who would hold a licence.

Two more make the model sharper: median hours from enquiry to itinerary sent, and the internal cost of preparing one itinerary. The second is uncomfortable to calculate and usually changes how a manager thinks about quoting everything that arrives.

These are example figures, substitute your own. They are illustrations of the arithmetic and are not outcomes, averages or forecasts for any agency.

Now add the cost side that travel businesses habitually omit. If an itinerary costs roughly ₹700 of consultant time to produce, 240 proposals a month is a real expense against a 15 per cent conversion rate. Sometimes the better decision is not more follow-up but fewer, better-qualified itineraries, and this model should be able to show you that too.

Baseline the equivalent season from last year rather than last month: enquiries by channel, itineraries sent, bookings confirmed, net margin per booking, and median hours to first proposal. Note any change in destination popularity or visa rules, which move travel demand faster than any process change can.

At 90 days, look at itinerary turnaround and coverage first. Both are countable and both should move within weeks if enquiries genuinely run through the system. Conversion follows, but leisure booking windows can exceed the measurement period, so a proposal sent in month one may not confirm until month four. Judge the leading indicators now and the conversion figure at six months.

It assumes consultant capacity is free. If your team is already producing itineraries from morning to evening in peak season, a higher enquiry-to-proposal rate means longer hours or worse proposals rather than more bookings. It assumes recovered bookings carry average margin, when follow-up tends to convert the price-sensitive travellers who were shopping three quotations precisely because budget was the constraint.

It ignores cancellation and postponement, which in travel are frequent and can reverse a booking counted months earlier. It ignores supplier rate movement, which affects margin far more than conversion does. And it credits software with a change in working habit: an agency that gives every itinerary three follow-ups captures much of this without buying anything.

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