Why Two Identical DMC Briefs Get Different Quotes

Two briefs land the same Tuesday morning. Same trip, near enough: two weeks across Thailand and Vietnam, twelve travellers, February. One gets a sharp number back. The other gets a number that is noticeably higher, and the agency who sent it will quietly assume our margin is fat. The real reason is in the brief. The first brief said which nights could not move. The second did not, and when we asked, the client had not decided, so every night in it was priced as fixed.

Think about a tailor. You ask for a navy suit for a wedding, and you will get a navy suit. But the tailor has already guessed your build, the season, whether you will be sitting down for six hours, and how much a tight shoulder will annoy you. Those guesses end up in the cloth and the cut and the price. Nobody hides them. Nobody mentions them either.

A brief works the same way. Every blank in it becomes a question back to you or a guess somebody makes on your behalf, at a desk you will never see. If you are still deciding who to send it to, start with how to vet a DMC. If you are still working out where a ground operator sits in your business at all, what a DMC actually is is the shorter read.

What happens to your brief before lunch

Picture your email landing at 8:40 on a Tuesday. I read it twice: once for the shape of the trip, once for what is not in it. The second read is the one that matters, and it is faster than you would like.

Then somebody opens a costing sheet and starts a row for every service day. Hotel. Guide. Vehicle. Entrances. Meals. The sheet does not accept blanks, which is the whole problem in one sentence. Every cell needs a number before the sheet will add up to a price, so each line your brief left out has to be either asked about or guessed.

So I end up with a page of questions only you can answer. Twelve people, six rooms or twelve? Are those February dates ticketed, or is that just when the client fancies going? Does anyone need a German speaker, or is English fine for all of them? Some desks do not wait for answers. They fill each blank with the answer they could defend if it turned out to be wrong.

This is the part I most want you to take away. That answer is never the optimistic one. A quote that cannot be honoured later is far worse for you than a quote you decline today, so an unknown gets priced at the arrangement that still works if the unwelcome version turns out to be true. Coming back to your client three weeks on to raise a price is a conversation that loses the booking, so such a desk sets every unknown high enough never to need that conversation. Each desk defends its guesses a little differently. That is why the same brief, sent to three DMCs, comes back as three different numbers.

Our rule is different: if something material is missing, we ask for it before costing. That costs you a day. Anything minor we still have to assume is listed in the proposal, where you can correct it.

What goes in the cell you left blank

Not everything in a brief changes the price. A paragraph about the client's interest in textiles is lovely, and I enjoy reading it, and it moves nothing. A handful of blanks move it a lot, and when they are priced instead of asked about, they all move it the same way, which is up. The table shows what a desk that prices blanks typically puts in each cell.

A tailor who does not stop to ask cuts for the version that still works through six hours of sitting.

The blank that costs the most

Rooming, and it is not close. If you fix one thing after reading this, fix this one. The brief says twelve travellers and stops. Somebody now has to decide whether that is six couples or twelve people who each want their own bathroom, and those are two entirely different hotel bills. The gap between them can be wider than the gap between two competing DMCs quoting the same trip. One line closes it: three twin, two double, two single. Add who pays the single supplement while you are typing.

A round headcount does quieter damage. Around ten to twelve, you write. Vehicles and guides are priced per day, not per head, so they do not divide evenly across a number that is still moving, and the per-person figure you get back is only true at the size you named. Our guide to reading a quote makes the same point from the other end.

Then there is the one from the opening. Tell us the flights are ticketed and nights six and seven are locked for a private dinner, and we are building around three fixed points with room to be clever everywhere else. Leave it out and we will ask. If nobody knows yet, every night is treated as immovable, and the cheapest version of your trip is the one we were never allowed to find.

The budget frame gets withheld on purpose, because agencies think naming a number invites me to spend it. The opposite happens. With no frame I aim at the middle, and the middle is wrong more often than it is right, usually by enough to send the whole proposal back for a second round. A band is enough, plus one word: target, or ceiling.

One question is worth more than all of them if the trip crosses both countries. Ask who delivers the second country, and which company you contract with there. A two-country trip can involve a second company, and sometimes a local partner, which is fine as long as the quotation names them; trouble starts when a second margin and a second set of standards enter the price without appearing on it. One programme, two countries explains what changes.

What should come back, and how quickly

An acknowledgement the same day or the next working day, from a person with a name. Then the proposal, by a deadline the DMC has given you. Ours is in the agency box at the end of this page. A longer deadline is honest in February on an island where the resort you want is small and already close to full, because your date is a phone call somebody has to make and then sit and wait on. A long wait is not honest when nothing arrives at all. Silence for a fortnight followed by a beautiful document is not thoroughness, it is a queue.

When the proposal lands, check four things before you read a single day of the itinerary: the per-person price at your real group size, what is in and what is out, the date the price expires, and the cancellation terms that will bind you. See how a booking settles for what those normally look like.

Then look for a list of what we assumed. I think that list is the most useful paragraph in any proposal, because it is where the guesses come out from behind the price and you can correct them in five minutes. If it is missing, ask. A DMC that cannot tell you what it assumed did not notice it was assuming.

A skeleton you can paste

Fill this in, send it, and I will not need to ask you any of the above.

One screen. Ten minutes.

Which brings us back to the tailor. That block is the moment you tell him you will be sitting down for six hours. He was going to ask or guess, and a guess goes into the cloth and into the price whether you like it or not. Now he does not have to do either. That is the whole difference between the two briefs that landed on Tuesday.

Copy the block, open our agency enquiry form, choose the destinations and paste it into the Message box on the final step. Net rates are issued to agencies that register with us; registration is free, with no minimum volume and no exclusivity.

One note on the example: its first three days, 8 to 10 February, fall inside Vietnam's official Tet break of 4 to 10 February 2027, so expect holiday supplements, closures and earlier hotel release dates. Our guide to Vietnam during Tet 2027 has the detail.