CRM & Lead Follow-up · Travel Agencies
CRM & Account Follow-up for Travel Agencies
A corporate travel agency's CRM has one job: make sure no account is lost to forgetfulness. It isn't a data archive and it isn't a dashboard for management. It's the thing that makes the proposal sent in March resurface in May, and the November renewal get prepared in August.
Why CRMs fail in agencies
- They ask too much. Fifteen mandatory fields to log a call guarantees the call doesn't get logged.
- They give nothing back. If a salesperson can't get something useful out of it before ten in the morning, they won't open it.
- They compete with the booking system. When the CRM is pushed to also be operations, it ends up a worse copy of something that already works.
- They're designed for the management report rather than the daily work of the person expected to fill them in.
How to build one people use
- Few fields, all actionable. If a piece of data doesn't change a decision, don't ask for it.
- Self-filling wherever possible. Emails and meetings attach to the account without manual work.
- Every account carries a date. In this sector the renewal date is the single most valuable field in the system, and the one almost nobody maintains.
- A daily view with three blocks: what I have to do today, which proposals are live with no reply, and which accounts are going cold on me.
Follow-up, where the money is
Most corporate accounts aren't lost at the proposal. They're lost afterwards, in the silence. The system covers three distinct follow-ups:
- Proposal sent. A reminder cadence that stops itself when the client replies, so nobody chases someone who already answered.
- Interested but no date. The one who said "not now, come back later." Filed with the reason and the timing, and it returns to the list on its own when the moment arrives.
- Renewal. Alerts at ninety, sixty and thirty days. A renewal worked three months out can be defended; one discovered the week before is already gone.
What gets measured
- Active accounts by stage, without inventing stages nobody uses.
- Live proposals and how old they are.
- Accounts with no contact in over ninety days.
- Next quarter's renewals, and which are prepared.
- Reply rate by type of counterpart, which is what tells you whether the message works.
Built on our CRM and lead follow-up foundation, the agency adjustment is easy to state and hard to sustain: each account's renewal date is treated as the most important record in the system, and kept current even in months when there's nothing else to report.
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Frequently asked questions
We already have a CRM and nobody uses it. Why would this be different?
Because the problem is usually not the tool — it's that the tool asks for more than it gives back. A CRM demanding fifteen fields to log a call gets abandoned in a fortnight. This is built the other way round: capture only what gets used later, fill itself wherever possible, and give the salesperson something useful every morning.
What actually needs storing on a corporate account?
Less than most systems ask for. Contacts and their role in the decision, renewal date, incumbent agency if known, travel policy if one exists, traveller profile, and the conversation history. Most of the rest is a field someone fills in badly and nobody reads.
Can it connect to the booking system?
Depending on the system, generally yes for the basics: identifying the account and its activity. Don't pipe everything across. The CRM exists to manage the commercial relationship, not to be a worse copy of the booking platform.