Writing
Notes on the commercial side of the job: planning fees, commission, markup, and what a quote actually costs to produce.
RSSIn most kinds of work a first draft is allowed to be rough. I do not think an advisor gets one.
A rough draft exists so you can find out you misread the brief while it is still cheap to fix. The first thing an advisor sends is read as the proposal, so the cheap version is not available and the expensive one has to be built before anyone learns anything.
Nobody sends a brief. They send a thread, and the trip is somewhere inside it.
The first task in a quote is not research and it is not pricing. It is reading back through a conversation that arrived in fragments and working out which budget number is the current one.
Most of a travel advisor's work happens before anyone has agreed to pay for it.
A thread of dates, a budget and half an idea is not a brief, and turning it into something a client can read back is what costs the evening. This is what happened when the whole conversation went in exactly as it arrived.
The unpaid hours in this trade are supposed to come before the yes. I think the worst ones come after it.
Most unpaid work in travel is a bet placed before a client says yes. The work a trip collapse demands is the opposite: the yes already happened, and the version of the outcome that is best for the client is the one that can leave the advisor with nothing.
A client is paying for the things that got taken out of the trip. I cannot find anything in this trade that bills for that.
Commission is a share of what the client spends, and a planning fee is often built by adding a supplement for each extra day, traveller and leg. Both are counted in units of more. The hours that go into taking something out land in neither one.
I keep counting the stages of one booked trip. The money only shows up in one of them.
Six or seven distinct pieces of work go into a booked trip, and only the booking itself looks like a sale from the outside. The pay arrives once, after travel, for hours spent months earlier.
A travel advisor can spend three to seven hours on a quote for someone who was never going to book.
The planning fee is almost never described as payment for time. It is described as a filter, which means it is priced against the odds rather than against the work.
A quote takes six hours. The profile that sells it reads like a hobby.
Advisor bios talk about passion, dream trips, and a long list of countries. They never mention what a trip costs to put together, what the advisor is paid, or by whom.
