How To Help Your Suppliers to Help You Get the Quotation

By moonstride | 15 July 2020

You have promised your client you’ll send an itinerary and quote this morning. Due to the time difference, you waited patiently overnight for an email from your supplier to ensure availability is held. You log-on and scan down the email, only to realise reservations have only held one room when you need two. You’ll have to email back again, and you feel frustrated. This is an all too familiar feeling for travel consultants confirming arrangements with suppliers over email, especially when working on different time zones.

It’s easy to blame our suppliers’ lack of attention to detail, but from my experience, disorganised or unclear requests often play a part. Whether we are talking about a DMC or an airport transfer company, suppliers are juggling multiple requests – especially during peak times – and English isn’t always their first language, so providing clear automated requests with full passenger details can really help resolve some of these issues.

On the moonstride platform, you can set up all the details you have for a new supplier, before building the quote. From basic contact information to additional profiling like marketing settings and currency, so that you can activate moonstride’s invoicing capabilities.

Once your supplier is set up, you can send a smart automated email request for the services required. Your suppliers simply click on a link embedded in the email and are redirected to a webpage to view your request. They can mark or change the confirmation status to confirmed, on hold, or declined. There’s a section to add notes (a useful space to suggest alternatives if necessary) and to add a confirmation number on confirmed services. As clients are profiled within the moonstride database, the supplier will also see the passenger’s full details, including names and dates of birth. Having this detail from the get-go allows your supplier to tailor requests appropriately, especially when children are involved, ensuring services booked are age appropriate, from car seats to room types. You can also send off the same request to multiple suppliers, which is a smart time saver.

By receiving requests in the same format every time, your suppliers will become familiar with the process and what to look out for. The requests are far easier to process than a wordy email listing what you might need, making it much easier to send this essential information to your suppliers, without running the risk of miscommunication or misunderstanding. Ultimately, the clearer your request, the more likely you’ll get what you need from your supplier, and the easier it will be to get your quote out on time!

The author has over a decade’s experience in the industry, specialising in luxury, tailormade experiential travel. Having worked across sales, product purchasing, and business development, she believes great systems and processes are the essential building blocks of a successful travel company whatever the size