Why generic CRMs fail travel teams (and what to do about it)
Generic CRMs treat every deal as a row. Travel deals are trips — multi-day, multi-supplier, margin-sensitive. Here's why that matters and how to fix it.
Most CRMs were designed for B2B SaaS sales: a contact, a deal, a stage, a close date. That model works fine when you sell a single SKU with a fixed price and a one-week sales cycle.
Travel is not that.
A travel “deal” is a trip — a multi-day, multi-supplier, multi-pax artefact whose margin depends on which hotel actually has availability the week your client wants to go. Forcing that into a generic CRM means you end up with two systems of record (the CRM for the deal, a spreadsheet or trip-management tool for the actual itinerary) and zero confidence in either.
Three places it breaks
- Quotes regress to PDFs. The CRM doesn’t know what’s on the trip, so the designer builds the itinerary somewhere else, exports a PDF, and attaches it. Now the deal record can’t tell you anything useful.
- Margin is invisible. Deal value is what the client pays. Margin depends on net cost from suppliers — which is in another tool. Forecasts are guesses.
- Ops re-keys everything. When the deal closes, operations opens a new system and types the trip in again. Half the data lossy. The other half subtly wrong.
What “trip-aware” looks like
A trip-aware CRM stores the day-by-day on the deal record. Suppliers and net costs are first-class. Margin computes live. When the deal closes, ops opens the same record — no re-keying, no lossy export.
That’s the bet behind OpenVoy CRM.