The travel sales pipeline, stage by stage, with exit criteria

A travel sales pipeline is the short list of stages an enquiry passes through between the first message and a confirmed booking, each with an exit criterion the whole team applies the same way. The names of the stages are yours. A pipeline earns its place when every stage answers "what must be true to move on?" and every open deal has a dated next action.

One pipeline per way you sell

A traveller booking a family holiday, a sub-agent asking for a hotel price and an overseas agency asking a DMC to cost a ten-day programme are three different sales. The cycle runs minutes, days or weeks; "won" means a paid booking, a booked request or a confirmed programme. Put all three on one board and the stages stop meaning anything.

The iTravel travel CRM starts every account with three pipelines: Trade (sub-agents and corporate accounts), DMC (overseas agents and tour operators) and Direct (travellers). Each has its own stages and its own answer time. You rename stages, add your own (up to twelve per pipeline), archive the ones you never use, and add pipelines of your own based on one of the three. The pipeline belongs to the deal, not to the account, so a DMC that also sells direct from its website runs both on one screen.

A renamed stage keeps its identity underneath, so no deal moves and no report breaks; a stage that still holds deals is archived, never deleted.

Stages and their exit criteria

The stages below are the starting set iTravel gives a DMC pipeline. The exit criteria are examples of the kind you write yourself: what is true, in your business, before a deal moves on.

A Direct pipeline starts shorter (Enquiry, Quoted, Booked, Travelled) and a Trade pipeline starts with Enquiry, Options sent, Booked, Invoiced, Completed. Write one exit criterion per stage, in one sentence, and pin it where the team can see it.

Costing is often where a DMC loses time. It goes faster when your hotel, transfer and tour costs live in rate sheets and contract rates rather than in last month's emails, and when the day-by-day quotation is built from them.

What actually moves a deal

A board needs only two answers from a seller: which stage, and what happens next. Everything else should either arrive by itself or be filled in when it matters.

Some moves are events, not decisions. In iTravel, when a client accepts a quotation on its link, the deal moves to its pipeline's won stage, unless you switch that off; when a booking that brought a deal in is cancelled (if you also run the booking portal), the deal closes as lost with "Booking cancelled". Every move, by a person or by an event, is written on the deal's history.

The moves a person makes can be held to your rules. A stage can require fields before a deal may enter it: "no proposal without a value", "no confirmation without travel dates and the operations owner". Nothing is required until you choose it. A rule like that disciplines sellers; it never refuses something that happened, so a client's acceptance still lands even when a field is empty.

No open deal without a dated next action

The commonest pipeline failure is a column of deals nobody is working. The cure is a rule: every open deal has a next action with a date and a person.

In iTravel a deal's "what happens next" is its earliest open task, and the board shows it on the card. The task list sorts work into Late, Today, Next 7 days, Later and No date, judged in your agency's timezone, for one person or the whole team. A task has a kind (call, email, WhatsApp, meeting or to-do), can be flagged important, and can carry a time and a reminder; each seller gets a morning email of what is due and can subscribe to a personal calendar feed. A note or a logged call counts as working the deal, so chasing a client all week never makes it look abandoned.

Two kinds of time limit catch what slips. A pipeline has an answer time, and a deal left untouched past it is flagged. A stage can also have its own limit ("Proposal sent: 16 working hours"), counted on your working week and holidays or on the plain calendar, with up to three steps when it passes: tell someone, reassign, create a task. A stage can also be set to rot after a number of days, so stale cards stand out.

Lost reasons that teach you something

Lost is not a failure of the pipeline; an unexplained loss is. Close every lost deal with a reason, and keep "stopped replying" as a reason rather than a stage where deals wait forever.

iTravel keeps the reason as the seller's own words, with suggestions to pick from that you can rename or archive: Price too high, The dates did not work, Booked with someone else, Stopped replying, Trip cancelled, Visa refused or delayed, and Other. You can make a reason required. The report groups them, so a month of losses reads as a short list with counts.

A lost deal is not the end of the client. The retry rule, on unless you switch it off, puts a task to try again on the owner's list a set time after the loss: 180 days unless you choose 60, 90, 270 or 365.

The owner's monthly view

Once a month, read the pipeline as numbers rather than cards. The useful questions:

• What arrived, what was won, what was lost, by month. Count wins by the month they were won.
• Conversion by stage, with the average time deals spend in each. A stage where deals sit is a stage that needs a person or a rule.
• Why we lose, grouped.
• Where deals come from, by source and by how a typed-in deal reached you, and where they go, by destination.
• Each seller against their target, in deals and in value.
• How fast enquiries were answered, per pipeline, against its answer time.
• What the open pipeline is worth, plain and weighted by each stage's chance of closing.

iTravel's reports answer each of these, with a spreadsheet download per section, and money is always shown per currency, never added across currencies. Targets are set per seller and month, as a number of deals, a value in one currency, or both. A deal is valued at its latest sent quotation, so the forecast follows the paper. You can save a report and have it emailed weekly or monthly.

A worked example: one month of a DMC pipeline

Say 40 requests for quotation arrive in a month. All figures are illustrative, in US dollars.

At month end 9 are confirmed, 19 lost and 12 still open: 2 in costing, 6 with a proposal out, 4 in negotiation. The lost reasons read: stopped replying 9, price too high 5, the dates did not work 3, booked elsewhere 1, visa 1.

The story is in the third row. Twelve of the nineteen losses happened after the proposal went out, proposals sat six days on average, and the top reason is silence, not price. The fix is quotation follow-up, not a lower markup.

The forecast. Using iTravel's starting probabilities for these stages (20% costing, 40% proposal, 60% negotiation): 2 deals at 2,500 weigh 1,000; 6 at 3,000 weigh 7,200; 4 at 5,000 weigh 12,000. The open pipeline is 43,000, weighted 20,200. Replace the starting percentages with your own conversion once you have a few months of it.

Checklist: a pipeline you can run tomorrow

• [ ] One pipeline per way you sell: direct, trade, DMC, groups if they run differently.
• [ ] Five to seven stages each, named in your team's words.
• [ ] One written exit criterion per stage.
• [ ] Required fields only where a missing one has cost you money.
• [ ] Every open deal has a dated next action and an owner.
• [ ] An answer time per pipeline and a time limit on the stage where deals stall.
• [ ] Lost always carries a reason; "stopped replying" is a reason, not a stage.
• [ ] Enquiries reach the board through lead management that gives each one an owner.
• [ ] Won deals reach operations through a sales to operations handover, not a forwarded email.
• [ ] A monthly report in your inbox, read before the sales meeting.