CRM for Hospitality

What selling travel actually looks like

A family in Manchester sends "do you have the villa with the pool for the second week of August, four adults two children" to three agencies on a Sunday evening. A couple in Riyadh asks four hotels for a rate for Eid. A company asks two venues for a quote for a 120-person dinner. In every case the enquiry is cheap to send and the decision is made within a day or two, on the first credible answer that includes a price, availability and a way to pay a deposit.

The evidence on speed is old and unambiguous. A Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies found that responding within an hour made a lead nearly seven times as likely to be qualified as waiting even an hour more, and that the average response time was 42 hours. Travel businesses are not slower than other businesses; they are seasonal, and the person answering WhatsApp in July is also checking in guests and chasing a transfer driver.

The second shape is the expiring date. Every enquiry has a departure or check-in date, and its value drops to zero on that date. A quote nobody chased, a deposit nobody collected and an option that lapsed all look like "in progress" in a spreadsheet until the date passes and they quietly become nothing. Making that clock visible is worth more than any amount of ad spend.

The pipeline we recommend starting from

Every stage below is an event that happened or did not. "Interested" and "thinking about it" are not stages.

For an event venue, replace "travelled" with "event held" and add "site visit done" between quote and deposit. For a boutique hotel selling direct, the pipeline is shorter — enquiry, quote, deposit, stayed — and most of the value is in the date-based follow-up. Starter includes two pipelines, Growth five, Business ten, so a business that does both groups and individual travel can keep them apart.

Guest and booking fields worth having

The lead-detail layout is configurable per role, so the reservations agent sees dates, party and quote fields, the guest-services team sees arrival logistics, and neither sees a wall of forty inputs. Tags cover the things that are not fields: honeymoon, repeat guest, agent-referred, VIP.

The inbox: where every guest starts

WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Messenger land in one shared inbox. A new conversation creates a guest record automatically with the full history attached, and the phone number is normalised to international format so the guest who messaged from WhatsApp in March and calls the reception line in July is one record, not two. Photos flow both ways: the guest sends a screenshot of a competitor's offer, the agent replies with the villa's pool and the sunset terrace from the same thread, and everything stays on the record.

Two settings matter for hospitality. Distribution: each channel carries a list of people to whom unowned conversations are assigned in turn, so a Sunday-evening enquiry has an owner before anyone has read it. Working-hours reply: a message that arrives outside the shift can trigger an automatic reply in the guest's language — "reservations open at 09:00; your dates are noted and we will confirm availability first thing" — which is the difference between a guest who waits and one who messages the next agency.

The inbox is scoped by ownership: an agent sees their own conversations and the unassigned pool, a manager sees the department's. Nothing is lost when someone is off; the manager reassigns in one action.

Guests in five languages and three time zones

Travel is the sector where the guest is, by definition, somewhere else. Three things in the product exist for exactly this.

• Country and language are system fields, derived from the phone number's country code the moment the record is created and editable afterwards. A rule can route German-speaking guests to the German-speaking agent and Arabic-speaking guests to the Arabic desk, automatically, before anyone has read the message.
• Each user has their own display time zone. Storage is UTC; the sales agent in Antalya and the coordinator in London see the same check-in and the same call time correctly. A reminder scheduled "the evening before arrival" means the guest's evening.
• The interface itself is available in five languages — English, Turkish, Arabic, French and Italian — so a multilingual reservations team is not forced to work in one. Arabic renders right-to-left throughout.

Templates for the welcome reply, the quote and the pre-arrival message can exist per language, and the automation picks the one matching the guest's language field.

Phone: reservations, guest services, the IVR

A travel business has two kinds of call: someone who wants to book, and someone who has booked and needs something. The phone module keeps them apart. An IVR on the main line — "1 for new reservations, 2 if you already have a booking, 3 for groups and events" — routes callers to the right people during shift hours, and to voicemail or a task outside them, with the audio prompts in the languages your guests speak.

The browser softphone connects to your existing SIP line, so a call made from the CRM is logged on the guest record with duration, direction and outcome, and an inbound call from a known number opens the record with the dates and the quote already on screen. There is no second phone system to buy and no personal mobile between the guest and the business.

For the January push — "everyone who enquired last summer and did not book" — the power dialer works through a filtered list one call after another, recording a disposition on each. For a small team it is the difference between doing that campaign and talking about it.

Date-based automations: the trip as a timeline

Because every booking has dates, the most useful automations are relative to them. The automation module works with relative dates — today plus 3 days, departure minus 7 days — on any date field, so the sequence below is configuration, not code.

1. Confirmed → pre-trip sequenceDeparture minus 14 days: documents and payment balance reminder. Departure minus 3 days: transfer details and the emergency number. Departure minus 1 day: "have a good trip" with the meeting point.
2. Option expiry minus 2 daysReminder to the guest and a task to the agent; if no deposit, the record moves back to "quote sent" and the rooms are released.
3. Return plus 2 daysReview request through the channel the guest already used.
4. Return plus 300 daysTask to the agent: "same dates next year?" — repeat guests are the cheapest bookings a travel business will ever make.

The same engine handles the stage-based rules — idle in "quote sent" for 5 days, notify the manager when a deal above a value reaches "deposit requested" — and each automation reports how many times it ran and how many records reached the next stage afterwards, so the sequence can be tuned rather than guessed.

Appointments: site visits and consultation calls

Not every hospitality sale is a chat and a deposit. Event venues sell through a site visit; luxury tour operators sell through a 30-minute consultation call; villa agencies book viewings for long lets. The appointment module handles these: a slot with a date, duration, a person or a room and a guest, bookable by staff from the record or by the guest from a public booking page, with reminders by WhatsApp, SMS or e-mail on the schedule you set.

The outcome — attended, cancelled, no-show — drives the pipeline. A no-show on a venue site visit moves the record back and opens a task to rebook, rather than leaving a stale "site visit booked" that the manager discovers in September. The shift calendar decides who is bookable when, so the Saturday site visits land with the person who actually works Saturdays.

Packages, tours and margins

Tours, room categories, transfer options and add-ons live in the products module. Each is a product with a sale price, a cost price and custom fields — duration, board basis, max party size, season — and can be imported from CSV or repriced in bulk by a percentage when the supplier changes rates. A deal attaches the products to the guest; when it is confirmed, the cost is booked as an expense automatically and the margin per booking is visible without a spreadsheet.

Commissions follow the same movement: per agent, as a percentage or a flat amount per confirmed booking, computed when the deal is won and attributed to the owner. Agents who sell through referral partners can carry a fixed referral fee on the same deal. Month-end becomes a report rather than an argument.

The season: response time under pressure

Response time in travel is not one number; it is a curve that rises with the season. The response-time report measures the minutes from a guest's message or call to the first human reply in working minutes, read from the shift calendar: a message at 23:40 answered at 09:12 the next morning is 12 minutes, not nine and a half hours. Enquiries outside shift hours are measured from the next shift start, so the day desk and the evening desk are on the same scale.

The report shows the average and median for the guests who were answered, how many are waiting right now, how many were never answered within a working day, and the split per agent and per channel. In July it will tell you that WhatsApp is at 40 minutes while phone is at 4 — which is the moment to move one person from the phone to the inbox, before the guests move to another agency.

Shift calendars can be per person, per department or a workspace default, and the clock-in widget records who was actually on, so the report reflects the desk that existed, not the one on the rota.

Who sees what in a travel business

Reservations agent

Own guests plus the unassigned pool; inbox, quotes, appointments; sees prices, not other agents' commissions.

Guest services / operations

Confirmed bookings for everyone, arrival logistics and tasks; no pipeline before deposit, no finance.

Groups and events

Its own pipeline and department scope; site-visit appointments; deal values above a threshold notify the owner.

Owner / general manager

All scope; finance, commissions, reports, activity log, export.

Data scope follows the department chart — own, department or all — and the activity log records who opened, edited, reassigned or exported which guest record, which matters when an agent leaves for a competitor in March with the summer enquiries. Export can be limited to managers.

Numbers an owner should watch

• First-response time in working minutes, per channel, per week of the season — the number that predicts bookings more than any other.
• Enquiry → quote → deposit rates, by source and by agent — which ads and which people convert, not just who is busy.
• Days in "quote sent" — the leak; if it grows, nobody is chasing.
• Options expired unconfirmed — rooms and seats held for nothing.
• Repeat-guest share of confirmed bookings — the cheapest revenue there is.
• Margin by product and by destination — with cost prices on packages, the tour that fills the calendar is not always the one that pays for it.

All of it comes from the pivot report builder — rows, columns, a measure, a chart, saved and exported to CSV — with no export to a spreadsheet first.

What this is not

This is not a property-management system, a channel manager or a booking engine. It does not hold room inventory or availability calendars, does not connect to online travel agencies or a global distribution system, and does not take card payments online. Keep inventory and rates in the system built for them; keep the enquiry, the conversation, the quote, the deposit chase, the pre-trip sequence and the follow-up here. Deposits are recorded as income when they arrive by whatever means you already use.

It is also worth saying plainly that automated daily backups of your workspace are not currently part of the service. Export what you must retain.

When it stops working

Which plan fits?

A villa agency with two people and one line of business runs on Starter. A tour operator or a hotel group with a reservations desk, guest services and ad-driven enquiries lands on Growth, for the date-based automations and the roles more than anything else. See the pricing page, and the inbox and automations pages for the two modules that carry the load.