What the real profit of a tour is
The real profit of a tour is what the agency keeps after paying everything that departure cost. It is not the selling price minus the main supplier's cost, which is the sum most of us do from memory.
The gap between those two sums sits in the costs paid per departure rather than per passenger: the van, the guide, the tolls. Those do not change whether two people travel or ten, so the margin per passenger moves with every booking that comes in.
The costs of a tour, one by one
A tour has two classes of cost, and what separates them is not how much they are but how they multiply: there are per-passenger costs and per-departure costs.
| Cost | Paid | Usual currency | When it is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entrance fees, lunch, equipment | Per passenger | The supplier's | When the product is loaded |
| A third party's boat trip or tour | Per passenger | Sometimes in dollars | When the product is loaded, at its agency rate |
| Guide | Per departure | Local currency | When the product is loaded |
| Vehicle and fuel | Per departure | Local currency | When the product is loaded, unless the rate moves by season |
| Payment processing fee | Per sale | The currency charged | When the payment lands |
| Commission to another agency | Per sale | The currency sold in | When the sale comes from the B2B network |
Product costs are loaded once and hold for every departure. Commissions appear after the sale, and they are what makes the profit you looked at when quoting different from the one you end up with.
The break-even point: how many passengers each departure needs
The break-even point of a tour is the number of passengers at which the sale covers the costs of that departure. Below that number the departure runs at a loss, even though the price per person is the same.
Take a receptive agency's half-day city tour at ARS 56,000 per person, with its own van and guide:
| 4 passengers | 2 passengers | |
|---|---|---|
| Sale | ARS 224,000 | ARS 112,000 |
| Guide (per departure) | ARS 45,000 | ARS 45,000 |
| Van (per departure) | ARS 60,000 | ARS 60,000 |
| Entrance fees (ARS 9,500 per passenger) | ARS 38,000 | ARS 19,000 |
| Total cost | ARS 143,000 | ARS 124,000 |
| Margin | ARS 81,000 · 36 % | ARS −12,000 |
Same product, same price, same supplier. With four passengers it returns 81,000 and with two it loses 12,000, and the only variable that moved was how many people got on the van. In this example the break-even point is three passengers.
That is why the minimum is worth deciding before the tour is published: below that number, either it merges with another departure, or it is sold as a private one, or it does not run. It is the same decision behind the minimum billable seats agencies use on their services.
Two currencies are two margins
When the product sells in one currency and the supplier charges in another, there are two margins, and they are not added together.
A boat trip sold at USD 145 per person that the operator settles at USD 112 returns USD 33 per passenger. The city tour above returns local currency. Converting the dollars to see "the day's profit" forces you to pick an exchange rate, and that rate changes the result: the number you get is not a fact, it is an opinion about the dollar.
The honest way to read it is per currency: this much in pesos, that much in dollars. And when the sale is in one currency and the cost in another, exchange risk is part of the margin and belongs in writing, not in your head.
What eats the profit after the sale
The profit worked out when quoting is rarely the one that remains, because four things come off it after the sale.
The payment processing fee takes a percentage of every online payment, and instalments take considerably more. A commission to another agency comes out of the same margin when the sale arrives through the network. Discounts given at the counter to close a sale, if they are not recorded, show up as a lower price with no explanation. And a no-show on a departure that already ran leaves the full cost with no sale against it.
None of the four can be avoided entirely. What can be done is keeping them in the same sum, so that the margin per product you read at month end includes what actually happened rather than what was expected when quoting.
How margin per product looks in travel agency software
Travel agency software earns its place here when it keeps the cost next to the product and works out the margin from the data of the sale, instead of asking for a separate spreadsheet at month end.
In Viajalo the cost is loaded once per product, with its currency and with the way it multiplies — per passenger or per unit — and every sale shows its margin in the product's currency. Three rules of that screen, which are decisions rather than details:
- Margin is shown per product and per currency, never adding different currencies together.
- If a supplier's cost is missing, the margin reads as unknown, not as zero.
- Tax stays out of it: the sale keeps its breakdown, so the margin is calculated on the net amount.
What no system decides for the agency is how to split a cost paid per departure. The cost is loaded per passenger or per unit, and how many passengers you are willing to run with is set by whoever operates. That decision, the minimum per departure, is what turns the calculation into a working rule.