Reference
The B2B travel trade, defined
40 words the trade uses daily and defines loosely — net rate against commission, allotment against freesale, stop-sell against blackout. The differences are where the money goes.
Who is who
The trade has more job titles than it has jobs, and the same company is often two of these at once.
- DMC
- A destination management company: the ground operator in a destination. It holds contracts with local hotels, transport and activity suppliers, and sells them to travel businesses elsewhere rather than to travellers. Its value is the contracts plus the ability to fix a problem in-destination on a Sunday.
- Tour operator
- A business that assembles travel components into a product it sells under its own name — a day tour, a multi-day itinerary, a departure series. It carries the commercial risk on capacity it has committed to.
- Consolidator
- A wholesaler that buys inventory at volume and redistributes it to a network of smaller agencies. Its margin comes from the spread between what it commits to and what it resells at, which is why its systems live or die on markup and credit control.
- Sub-agent
- A travel business that books through another travel business rather than directly with suppliers. Sub-agents are the buyers a B2B portal is built for: they have an account, a balance, a history, and they book on behalf of someone else.
- Inbound / receptive operator
- An operator that handles arrivals into its own country on behalf of agents abroad. Functionally close to a DMC; the word is more common in Europe and Latin America.
- TMC
- A travel management company: an agency serving corporate travel programmes rather than leisure. Buys differently — policy, approval and reporting matter more than photography.
- Merchant of record
- Whoever the customer legally transacts with, and therefore who is responsible for the charge, the refund and the tax. Worth establishing explicitly in any platform relationship, because it decides who carries a chargeback.
Money and pricing
Most of the money lost in this trade is lost to vocabulary used loosely. These words are not interchangeable.
- Net rate
- What you pay the supplier — your cost. It belongs next to the price you sell at, on the same screen, and nowhere near your agents. See net rates, markup and agent tiers.
- Sell rate
- What a specific agent pays you. In a business with agent tiers there is no single sell rate, which is exactly why it should be derived from a rule rather than typed into a second rate sheet.
- Markup
- The amount added to a net rate to produce a sell rate — a percentage of the cost, or a fixed amount per booking, per person or per night. Which of those it is changes the answer materially, and is the detail most systems are vague about.
- Commission
- The same money seen from the other end: a discount off a published price. In a net-rate business, "10% commission" and "10% markup" are different numbers, and teams that use the words interchangeably lose the difference.
- Gross / rack rate
- The published consumer price. Useful as a reference for what an agent can resell at; dangerous the moment it leaks into your own cost arithmetic.
- Prepaid wallet
- A balance an agent tops up in advance and draws down as they book. It removes credit risk and collections, at the cost of friction for a new agent. See agent credit without the spreadsheet.
- Credit limit
- A ceiling an agent may book up to before settling. Easier to sell than prepay, and it means you are lending — with limits, terms, ageing and an awkward conversation attached.
- Hold
- A reservation of funds that are not yet spent, placed while a booking is being made. Available balance is the balance minus active holds. Without holds, a failed booking either eats an agent’s money or lets them spend it twice.
- Ledger
- An append-only record of every money movement, each with a reason, a reference and a time. The balance is the sum of the rows rather than a number somebody can edit — which is what makes a disputed figure a two-minute conversation.
- Minor units
- Money held as a whole number of the smallest denomination — 1250 rather than 12.50 — with the currency carried alongside. Decimals accumulate floating-point error that surfaces as one-cent mismatches during reconciliation.
Inventory and availability
The words that describe what you are actually allowed to sell, and when.
- Allotment
- A number of rooms, seats or places a supplier has committed to you for a date. It is real inventory: it runs out, and it has to be consumed at the moment of booking rather than checked beforehand, or two agents will take the last one.
- Freesale
- Permission to sell without a fixed allotment, on the understanding that the supplier can honour it. Simpler to load and riskier to rely on during peak.
- Stop-sell
- A supplier instruction to stop selling a date immediately, regardless of remaining allotment. It has to override everything else, including a special price somebody set last week.
- Release period
- The point before arrival at which unsold allotment goes back to the supplier. Miss it and you are holding rooms you cannot sell; ignore it and you are selling rooms you no longer have.
- Room type
- A category of room with a real maximum occupancy and, usually, a maximum number of children — taken from the contract rather than from the hotel’s website, because the website is marketing.
- Rate plan
- A commercial wrapper around a room type: the meal plan, the cancellation policy, the minimum stay and the booking window. The same room on two plans is two products, and that is correct.
- Season
- A dated period with its own prices. Contracts routinely put a peak period inside a general one, so a system needs one unambiguous rule for which wins — most specific covering period, decided once.
- Occupancy pricing
- Prices stated per number of occupants — single, double, triple, extra bed, child — rather than a nightly rate with fractions applied. Nearly every hotel contract works this way.
- Supplement
- A mandatory extra: a gala dinner, a city tax, a peak surcharge. Priced per person, per room, per night or per stay, and worth modelling explicitly so a total can always be explained to an agent.
- Meal plan
- What is included: room only, bed & breakfast, half board, full board, all-inclusive. It belongs on the rate plan, not in a description, so the cancellation rule and minimum stay travel with it.
- Blackout date
- A date on which a product may not be sold at all, whatever else is configured. Related to, but not the same as, a stop-sell — a blackout is usually yours, a stop-sell is usually the supplier’s.
- Operating days
- The days a tour actually runs. The only thing that should be able to open a date: overrides may close it, re-cap it or re-price it, never force it open. See loading contracted inventory.
- Time slot
- A departure or entry time with its own capacity, which is not the same as the product’s capacity for the day. Timed-entry attractions and boats need them; a full-day tour usually does not.
- Age band
- The adult, child and infant boundaries an operator actually uses, with their own prices. Children are rarely half price and infants are rarely free, so the numbers come from the contract.
- Cut-off
- The latest moment a booking can be made — "by 16:00 the day before". It is a rule about the product’s local time, not the seller’s, which matters the moment an agent is in another time zone.
Booking and documents
What happens at the moment of sale, and what the agent is left holding.
- Booking engine
- The part of a portal that quotes a price, checks and consumes availability, moves the money and produces a document — ideally all inside one transaction. See how a B2B booking engine works.
- Snapshot
- The price, policy, inclusions and instructions frozen into a booking at the moment it is made. A voucher reprinted a year later renders from the snapshot, so it cannot show a policy that did not exist when the guest bought.
- Voucher
- The document an agent forwards to their client: what was bought, for whom, when, where to be and who to call. In a white-label portal it carries the agency’s brand and licence number, not the platform’s.
- E-ticket code bank
- Pre-purchased entry codes held as stock. They gate the sale like any other capacity, are assigned under lock at booking, and are voided rather than returned to the pool on cancellation — the code was spent whether or not it was used.
- FIT
- Free independent traveller: an individual or family booking rather than a group departure. Priced from the standard rate structure, sold in ones and twos, and the volume most B2B portals are built to absorb without a person in the middle.
- GIT
- Group inclusive tour: a group moving on a fixed programme, usually quoted rather than sold off a shelf, and often with its own contracted rates.
- Amendment
- A change to a confirmed booking — dates, names, occupancy. Commercially it is a cancellation and a rebooking wearing a friendlier name, and any system should be honest about which supplier rules apply.
- White-label
- A platform that never appears to the end buyer: your domain, your brand, your emails, your documents. If the platform’s name is in the email footer, it is not white-label. See what white-label has to mean.
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A portal that already knows these words
Allotment, rate plan, season, stop-sell, age band, cut-off — they are fields, not free text, and the booking engine enforces every one of them.
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