The travel agency reports that actually change decisions

Every booking platform ships with reports, and most of them are never opened twice. The ones that get used share a property: they answer a question somebody was already asking, and they suggest an action.

Margin per supplier, not sales per supplier#

Sales volume by supplier tells you almost nothing, because a supplier can carry high volume at negligible margin. Margin per supplier, alongside win rate, tells you whether a source is earning the latency and the search cost it consumes.

This is the report that decides whether to keep a second bedbank or a second GDS, and it usually gives a clear answer within a month of the source going live.

Look-to-book by supplier#

On agreements that charge per shopping request, this is a direct cost line. A source searched ten thousand times that wins forty bookings is a bill, not a supplier. It is also an early warning for supplier limits, which are breached quietly and enforced abruptly.

The action it suggests is specific: restrict that source to the routes or markets where it wins, or throttle its share of searches.

Credit ageing by agent#

Not outstanding balance — ageing. An agent owing a large amount that is thirty days old is a normal working relationship. The same amount at ninety days is a different conversation, and the difference is invisible in a single balance figure.

Bucketed ageing turns credit control from a monthly panic into a weekly routine, and it is the single most valuable report in a B2B operation.

Refund exposure, both directions#

What you owe customers and what suppliers owe you, tracked separately with ageing on both. Agencies routinely pay a customer refund before the supplier settles, which is a legitimate service decision but becomes dangerous when nobody is measuring the aggregate.

Seen as a single exposure number, it tends to change how quickly refunds are chased.

ADM log by cause#

Debit memos logged against the booking and the person responsible, with a dispute status. Individually they are an irritation. Aggregated by cause, they reveal a pattern — a particular agent, a particular supplier, a particular booking practice — and that pattern is fixable.

Most agencies discover, when they first aggregate this, that a large share traces to a small number of repeated mistakes.

The one nobody builds but everyone needs#

A daily flash: yesterday's bookings, margin, cancellations and outstanding, delivered to your phone before you reach the office. It replaces the first hour of the day for most owners, and it is the report most likely to be read every single day.