Shore Thing

Every travel agency owner knows the rhythm even if nobody’s ever put a name to it: a stretch where bookings and commission checks feel endless, followed by a stretch where the phone barely rings and the bank account reflects it. Feast, then famine, on a cycle that doesn’t always follow the calendar the way you’d expect. The mistake isn’t having this rhythm — it’s building a budget and a lifestyle that assumes the feast part is the normal part. Why a standard household budget

If there’s one category of transaction that turns travel agency bookkeeping into a genuine puzzle, it’s the world of supplier credits, future travel credits, partial refunds, and rebooked trips — money that moves in directions and on timelines that don’t exist in most other small businesses. A client cancels. The supplier issues a future travel credit instead of cash. Six months later that credit gets applied to a different trip, at a different price, sometimes with a differe

Ask a travel agent whether they have errors and omissions insurance and you’ll sometimes get a confident yes, sometimes a confident no, and surprisingly often: “I think my host agency covers that? I’m not totally sure.” That “not totally sure” is the problem I want to address. What E&O insurance actually is. Errors and omissions insurance covers you if a client claims you made a mistake, gave bad advice, or failed to do something you were supposed to do in the course of booki

Whether you’re affiliated with a host agency or running fully independent as your own registered entity changes more about your bookkeeping than most travel agents realize when they’re making the decision — and it’s worth understanding before you set up your books, not after you discover they don’t match your actual situation. The basic structural difference. A host agency provides you an umbrella — often handling your accreditation (like an IATA or CLIA number), supplier rel

Let me start by saying something important: none of these are stupid mistakes. They’re incredibly common, completely understandable, and almost always the result of nobody ever explaining how travel agency finances actually work — because the travel industry has its own financial rhythm that generic business advice doesn’t account for. Here are the five I see most often. 1. Treating commission income like regular income. This is the big one. When you book a trip, you don’t ge