How travel agents price hotels and villas without twenty open tabs

Pricing a brief means turning "a villa in Paros for a week in June, under 4,000, with a pool" into five real options with live prices the client can choose between. Every agent does it, most do it in a browser with twenty tabs open, and it is the part of the job that eats evenings. This page is how it is done well by hand, and what changes when software reads the sites for you.

Where the time goes

The sites an agent trusts are not one site. A villa brief means the specialist villa companies the agent has booked with for years, a hotel brief means the operators and one or two of the big booking sites for a price check, and every one of them has its own search form, its own way of asking for dates and party, and its own idea of what a result looks like. The agent types the same brief into each, scrolls, copies prices into a note or a proposal, and does it again when the client changes the dates.

Three things make this slower than it looks. The party has to be set correctly on every site, adults and children's ages, or the price is wrong. The dates have to be set the same way on every site, and a site that wants a Saturday changeover will quietly move them. And a price copied on Tuesday is a Tuesday price, so a proposal sent on Thursday needs a note of when each figure was seen.

The honest shortcut most agents use

Most agents end up with a short list of sites they always check, in a fixed order, and a note template with a column per site. That is a reasonable system. It fails in two places: when the client's brief falls outside the usual lane, so a site the agent does not normally use might have the answer, and when the brief changes, because every site has to be searched again from the top.

The temptation at that point is a general price-comparison site. They are quick, but they show what they are paid to show, they rarely carry the specialist villa companies at all, and the agent cannot book through them with the commission intact. They are fine for a sanity check on a hotel price and wrong as a source of options.

What reading the sites by software changes

The same job can be done by software that knows how to search each site the agent trusts. The brief is typed once. The software runs it on every site in the agent's list, with the party and dates set correctly, and brings back the real properties with their live prices and a link to each, stamped with the time they were seen. The agent reads a shortlist instead of twenty tabs, picks the options worth showing, and the proposal carries the prices and the dates they were seen.

This is what Holidr's research does. An agent asks for "a hotel in Rome near the centre, 4 star, two adults, 12 to 15 March" or "villas in Paros under 4,000 for a week in June", on a client's trip or with no client at all, and Holidr searches the sites that agent trusts, from the specialist villa companies to the booking sites used for a price check, then lays the real properties with live prices on the trip. Hotels or short-term lets, the agent ticks the ones worth showing, and the proposal is drafted from them. The same shortlist can become a post for the agent's social accounts, with the prices and the date they were seen, which is covered in what to post as a travel agent.

Two honest limits. The sites are the agent's own list, curated with Holidr, not every site on the internet, so a brief outside the lane still needs the agent's judgment about where to look. And a live price is live when it was seen: the booking happens through the agent's own channel at whatever the rate is then, which is why every figure carries its timestamp.

What to keep doing by hand

The judgment. Which five of the forty results a particular client will actually like, which villa owner answers the phone, which hotel is three streets further from the centre than its description admits. Software brings back the options and the prices. The agent's value was never the typing, it was knowing which one to send, and that is the part that stays.

The pricing is one of the four jobs on Holidr's desk, alongside filing, commission and chasing. Admin hours are client hours is the case for taking all four off yours, and the 90 days are free.