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. It is not. The first brief said which nights could not move. The second left us to work that out on our own.

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 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. It gets read 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. A number has to go in each cell today, whether or not your brief supplied one.

So the room fills with questions only you can answer, and you are not there. 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? Nobody waits. Each blank gets the answer we could defend if we turn out to be wrong.

That is the part worth understanding. We do not guess optimistically. A quote we cannot honour 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 a client three weeks on to raise a price is a conversation that loses the booking. Nobody in the room is willing to have it.

What we write 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 it moves nothing. A handful of blanks move it a lot, and they all move it the same way, which is up.

The tailor does not stop cutting because you never mentioned the six hours of sitting. He cuts for the version that still works if you are.

The blank that costs the most

Rooming, and it is not close. 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: four twin, three 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. Tell us nothing and every night is treated as immovable. 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 us to spend it. The opposite happens. With no frame we aim at the middle, and the middle is wrong more often than it is right, usually by enough to waste the week it took. 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 whose team runs the second half. Plenty of operators sell Thailand and Vietnam as one product and hand the Vietnam leg to a company you will never meet, which is where a second margin and a second set of standards enter the price without appearing on it. One contract, 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. A first proposal within a few working days for a standard private trip. Longer is honest work 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. Longer 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. 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 most of the questions above never get asked.

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 guess anyway, and the guess was going into the cloth and into the price whether you liked it or not. Now he does not have to guess. That is the whole difference between the two briefs that landed on Tuesday.