How to book a trip with a travel company: the eight steps

What a travel company actually does for you

A travel company does three separable things. It sources — it holds rates and allocations you cannot see, with hotels, guides, drivers and boats. It designs — it turns a list of places into a workable sequence with realistic travel times. And it carries risk — if the driver does not appear, that is the company’s problem to fix, not yours.

Those three jobs are worth different amounts on different trips. On a two-night city break you are paying mostly for design you could do yourself. On a three-week multi-country route with a group of eight, sourcing and risk are worth far more than the margin you pay for them.

Understanding which of the three you are buying is the whole basis for deciding whether to use an agency at all, and for judging whether a quote is fair. Everything below follows from it.

Step 1 — Decide what you are buying before you contact anyone

Write down, in one line, whether you want a full package (flights, ground, guiding, everything under one contract), a land-only itinerary (you book your own flights), or a single component such as a villa with a driver.

This matters more than the destination. A full package sold in the EU falls under the Package Travel Directive (2015/2302), with insolvency protection and defined remedies. A collection of separate bookings you assemble yourself does not, even if the same company sold you each piece.

Decide your dates, or at least a two-week window, and decide your ceiling. A company cannot design to a budget you have not set, and the most common cause of a useless quote is a brief that never mentioned money.

Step 2 — Shortlist three or four companies, not ten

Specialism beats size. A company that runs Puglia every week knows which masseria has building work this season; a general agency will book from the same public inventory you can see. Filter by destination first, then by trip type — family, walking, food and wine, self-drive, small group.

Three or four is the right number to brief. Fewer and you have no price reference. More and you will not read the quotes properly, which is exactly how buyers end up choosing on headline number alone.

On ETC you can send one brief to several verified companies at once and get their replies side by side, which removes most of the copying and pasting. The contract, in every case, is between you and the travel company — never with the platform.

Step 3 — Send one written brief, not a chain of questions

A brief should contain destination and interest, dates, who is travelling and their ages, the services you need, a total budget range, and two or three non-negotiables. That is roughly 150 words and it changes the quality of what comes back.

A budget range is not a signal to spend it all. It tells the company which tier of hotel to price and whether to propose private guiding or shared. Without one, most companies hedge upward, because a quote that looks cheap and disappoints costs them more than one that loses the sale.

Ask explicitly for a line-item quote. If the reply is a single number for “12 days, all included”, you cannot compare it with anything, and you will not know what was quietly removed to hit the price.

Step 4 — Compare quotes line by line, not on the headline

Put the quotes in a column each and check the same eight rows: hotel names and room categories, meal basis, which transfers are private and which are shared, guiding hours per day, entrance fees, internal flights or trains and their class, what happens on free days, and the cancellation terms.

Differences of 20–30% between two serious quotes are almost always explained here. A four-star superior in the historic centre against a four-star in a business district twenty minutes out is a real price difference, not a discount.

• Room category — “double room” and “deluxe with terrace” are different products at the same hotel.
• Guiding — half-day, full-day, or “guide available”, which means nothing.
• Transfers — private car, shared shuttle, or a rail ticket you collect yourself.
• Entrance fees and permits — commonly excluded and commonly expensive.
• City taxes — usually payable locally and rarely in the headline figure.
• Driving trips — check whether ZTL restricted-zone access and fines are addressed at all.

Step 5 — Verify the company before you discuss money

Ask for the registered company name, the registration number and the country of registration, then check the number against that country’s trade register. A real operator answers this in one line. Hesitation is the answer.

Ask separately how client money is protected if the company fails. In the EU that means naming the insolvency protection scheme or bond required under the Package Travel Directive. In the UK, flight-inclusive packages need an ATOL number, which you can check on the CAA register. In Turkey, ask for the TÜRSAB membership and licence group.

A verification badge — ours included — confirms that documents were checked at a point in time. It cannot tell you the company will still be solvent in nine months, and any platform that implies otherwise is overselling.

Step 6 — Pay the deposit, but only on written terms

Normal deposits are 10–30% for tailor-made travel, 25–50% for villas, and 50% or more for yacht charter, with the balance due 45–60 days before departure. Anything demanding 100% up front months ahead needs a reason you find convincing.

Pay by credit card where you can. Card payment preserves a chargeback route and, for UK cardholders, Section 75 joint liability on transactions between £100 and £30,000. A bank transfer has neither. If a company takes only transfers and will not explain why, treat that as a decision about your money, not about their admin.

Read the cancellation ladder before you send anything. It is normally a table by days-to-departure, and it is the clause you are most likely to need.

Step 7 — Sign off a final itinerary with names and times

The document you approve should name every hotel, every room category, every included meal, pick-up times, guide languages, and the emergency contact who answers a phone in the destination out of hours.

“Four-star hotel or similar” is acceptable in a proposal and not acceptable in a confirmed itinerary within 60 days of travel. Ask for the substitution to be defined: same category, same area, or your money back.

Check the names on flight and rail tickets against passports the day they are issued, not the week before departure. Name changes are cheap on day one and often impossible later.

Step 8 — The 30 days before you go

Reconfirm three things: the arrival transfer with a flight number attached, any timed entries such as museums or ballooning slots, and anything weather-dependent that has a stated alternative.

Buy travel insurance when you pay the deposit, not at the airport. Cancellation cover only works if it was in place before the reason to cancel existed.

Take the operator’s local emergency number offline, on paper. The moment you most need it is usually the moment you have no data.

The three points where buyers lose money

First, the vague brief. A company that does not know your budget prices defensively, and you either overpay or receive a proposal you reject after two weeks of correspondence. The cost here is usually 10–20% of trip value and a fortnight of time.

Second, the unread inclusion list. Two quotes that look €900 apart are often identical once you add the entrance fees, the city taxes, the airport transfer and the four dinners one of them excluded. Buyers who choose on headline price pay the difference later, in cash, on the ground.

Third, the transfer sent before the terms were read. This is where the losses stop being annoying and start being total. Money moved by bank transfer to a company you did not verify, under terms you did not receive in writing, has no recovery route if the company fails or was never real.

So is it worth using a travel agent?

For a weekend in Lisbon with one hotel and a budget flight, honestly no. You will pay a margin for bookings you could make in twenty minutes, and you will lose flexibility on changes.

It becomes worth it when the trip has moving parts: multi-country routes, groups above six, remote regions where availability is thin, anything with permits or private access, family trips where a failure ruins a week, and any destination where you do not read the language of the small print.

The honest test is to ask what you would do if the second connection failed at 22:00. If the answer is “work it out”, book direct. If the answer is “no idea”, you are buying risk transfer, and that is what the margin pays for.

Travellers pay nothing to use ETC. Companies pay to be listed and verified, which is worth stating plainly because it is the only way to read what a marketplace is incentivised to show you.

Some companies charge a planning fee of €150–€500 for tailor-made work, usually credited against the trip if you book. That is a legitimate charge for design time and it tends to correlate with better first proposals, because the company is not writing speculatively.

• Cost to you of using a marketplace — nothing.
• Cost of a planning fee — €150–€500, normally credited against the booking.
• Cost of a vague brief — commonly 10–20% of trip value, plus two weeks.
• Cost of an unread inclusion list — paid later, in cash, on the ground.