Travel quotes: the 24 hours that decide who wins the booking
The client who asks you for a quote sends four more requests the same evening. The nicest proposal doesn't win — the one that shows up in time does. Here's how to keep pace.
Tuesday, 9:40 pm. A family has just filled in your enquiry form for a Vietnam tour in April. You’ll spot it tomorrow morning between two calls and reply on Thursday, once the local partner has confirmed availability. In the meantime, that same family has written to three other agencies and two platforms. You don’t know that. By now they’re not entirely sure who they wrote to either. Whoever answers first becomes, in their mind, “the agency”.
What the numbers say — and what they don’t
The reference study is from 2011: researchers published in the Harvard Business Review an audit of 2,241 US companies. Some 37% answered an online enquiry within the hour, 23% never answered at all, and the average first response took 42 hours. The headline finding: firms that contacted a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even an hour longer — and more than sixty times as likely as those that let 24 hours go by.
It’s not a travel study, and a tailor-made itinerary can’t be priced in ten minutes. But the mechanics are identical: an enquiry is hot when it’s sent and cools while you hunt for the domestic flight fare. On the travel side, a 2019 study by the French consultancy Résaconseil put the average enquiry-to-booking conversion at around 22% — roughly 4.5 requests for every sale. Every enquiry that goes cold is a fifth of a booking gone.
One warning: the “78% of customers buy from the first company that responds” line that shows up in every webinar has no traceable original study. The figures above are more than enough.
Replying fast is not quoting fast
The classic mistake is thinking you can only reply once the quote is finished. Wrong. There are two replies, and they do different jobs.
The first is the human acknowledgement. A five-minute call or a personal message within the hour, during opening times, that says three things: I’ve read your request, here are two questions to sharpen it, you’ll have a proposal by Thursday noon. That isn’t a quote — it’s a claim. The client knows someone is there, has a first name and a date. They stop shopping around, or at the very least they wait for you.
The second is the proposal itself. Here, 24 to 48 hours is fine — provided you announced it. What kills the deal isn’t the delay. It’s the silence.
Setting the agency up to hit the hour
A one-hour reply doesn’t run on goodwill. It runs on three settings.
First, a single landing point. Web form, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs: everything must arrive in one place, with a named person per half-day whose job is to triage. An enquiry asleep in the inbox of a consultant on leave is an enquiry lost.
Second, fill-in-the-blank replies. Not cold templates: three or four frames per trip type (tour, resort stay, group, milestone trip) with two qualifying questions ready to go — fixed or flexible dates? budget per person or overall? Three minutes to complete, and it still sounds like you.
Third, a quote that can actually be read. A twelve-page PDF with the terms and conditions on page two doesn’t get read on a phone at 10 pm. What converts is a one-page summary — price, what’s included, what isn’t, a validity date and a button to call — with the day-by-day detail underneath. Then a short follow-up scheduled for day three that offers to adjust the plan rather than asking “have you had a chance to think about it?”.
The quote isn’t the end of the relationship. It’s the start.
Here’s what the race to reply faster leaves out: speed wins the file, it doesn’t bring the client back. An agency that spent two hours building a flawless proposal, sold it, and delivered a great trip finds itself six months later exactly where its competitors are — on the list of five agencies that same family will contact for their next project.
Unless the trip left a trace outside the screen. That’s the bet behind Fidélicarte: during the holiday, your client sends a real postcard in your colours to the people back home, printed and mailed from France via a simple QR code. The quote convinced one family; the card lands with the sister, the colleague, the next-door neighbour — people who, statistically, travel the way she does and haven’t contacted anyone yet. And it stays on the fridge long after the PDF has vanished into an inbox. Run the numbers with your own margins in the ROI calculator.
The takeaway
A human touch within the hour, a dated proposal within 48 hours, a follow-up on day three: that trio alone puts you ahead of most agencies, which answer in two days or not at all. Then, once the file is signed, turn your attention to what happens in the 48 hours after the trip — and during the trip itself. Speed wins you the first sale. The trace the holiday leaves behind brings you the next ones.