It is 8am on a Monday.
Your sales team sits down. The inbox has 60 new enquiries from travel agents and B2B partners. Each one needs a quoted response — with the right hotels, the right rates, the right transfers, formatted into a PDF and sent back professionally.
By noon, they have managed 20 of the 60.
The other 40 will wait until tomorrow. Some of those partners have already moved on.
This is not a staffing problem. This is not a motivation problem. This is simply a task that should not be done by hand — and in most DMC operations, nobody has stopped to ask why it still is.
The Real Cost Nobody Is Tracking
Most DMC managers think about this in terms of hours. The team is slow. Quotation takes too long. Let's make the template faster.
That is the wrong way to look at it.
The right question is: what does a senior sales person actually cost you when they spend three hours every morning filling in quotation templates?
It is not just their salary for those three hours. It is every client call they did not make. Every relationship they did not follow up. Every complex itinerary that needed their expertise and sat waiting because they were busy extracting dates from an email and looking up hotel rates in a spreadsheet.
You cannot see that cost on a P&L. But it is there every single day.
The Speed Problem Is Even More Serious
Here is something most DMC operators know but do not say out loud.
When a travel agent sends an enquiry, they usually send it to two or three DMCs at the same time. They are not looking for the cheapest quote. They are not waiting for the most detailed quote. They are taking the first good quote from a supplier they trust.
If your team takes 45 minutes to respond and your competitor takes 5 minutes, the booking is already gone before you hit send.
Speed is not a nice-to-have in DMC sales. Speed is the difference between winning the booking and writing a very good quote that nobody reads.
Why Most DMCs Have Not Fixed This Yet
If you ask a DMC operations director why their team still quotes manually, the answer is almost always one of three things.
"Our pricing is too complex to automate." DMC pricing is complex — contracted rates, seasonal variations, partner tiers, group size breaks. That is real. But complexity in your pricing rules does not mean the execution of those rules has to be manual. Your team does not invent new pricing every time an email arrives. They follow rules that already exist. That part — the reading, the matching, the formatting — is exactly what a machine does better than a person.
"We tried a tool once and it didn't work." Most quotation tools fail because they live outside your ERP. They generate a quote in their own system and then someone has to manually copy it into your actual business software. That is not automation. That is just moving the problem one step to the right.
"It is just how this industry works." This one is the most expensive belief of all. The industry is not standing still. Some DMC operators have already automated their quotation workflows. They are responding in minutes, not hours, with zero manual input. The gap between them and everyone else gets wider every week.
What Automated Quotation Actually Looks Like
When quotation automation is built properly — inside your ERP, connected to your live pricing data — this is what changes.
An enquiry email arrives. The system reads it. It pulls the relevant rates from your live pricing database. It builds the quotation in your template. It puts it in front of a sales executive for a two-minute review and one-click send.
The sales executive did not read the email. They did not open a rate sheet. They did not build anything from scratch. They reviewed and approved.
Total time: under three minutes.
What did not change: your pricing decisions, your template, your brand, your sales executive's name on the email. The partner on the other end has no idea the process changed. They just got a faster, more accurate quote.
One Number Worth Sitting With
A DMC handling 100 enquiries a week, each taking 40 minutes to quote manually, spends roughly 4,000 hours a year on quotation administration alone.
That is two full-time employees. Every working hour of every working day. Just reading emails and filling in templates.
What would your business look like if those two people were building client relationships instead?
This Is a Solvable Problem
Manual DMC quotation is not an industry inevitability. It is a process that has not yet been replaced — in most cases, because no one has put it on the agenda.
The technology exists. The integration with ERP platforms like Odoo is proven. The implementation is measured in weeks, not months. And the return shows up in the first week of operation — in faster response times, fewer errors, and a sales team that is finally doing the work they were hired to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
