I once handed a client a recommendation I could not source, and it fell apart in the second meeting when they asked where the figure came from. Since then every claim we send out passes through this checklist first, which I run once a season and again before any tender response.
Start with what actually happened
- Pull twelve months of completed trips: flights, ground transport, hotel nights and cancellations, in one file.
- Note who travelled and why, because a trip cut for lack of a date is a different problem from a trip cut for lack of budget.
- Record where the numbers came from, since a figure with no source cannot be defended in a review.
Map the operations before you recommend anything
Advice that skips the mapping stage tends to recommend a change nobody can execute.
- Which suppliers touch a typical booking, and which of them can actually change their terms.
- Where the same information is held twice and disagreeing with itself.
- Which steps in the process exist only because they have always existed.
Check every source you intend to quote
- Prefer lifecycle and climate data with a method attached over an estimate passed down from a slide.
- Confirm the figures still have a current version and a publication date you can name.
- Check the recommendation against the goals the client already signed up to, so we are not proposing one target by breaking another.
Make the outcome measurable
A plan without a number attached becomes a brochure. Each item we propose gets a baseline, a date and a way to check it, which is also what protects a client from an accusation of dressing up intent as result.
- What the number is today, measured the same way next time.
- What would count as progress within twelve months.
- What evidence the client can show a third party who asks.
Write it so a traveller can use it
- One page of findings, one page of actions, each action with a named owner.
- The limits stated plainly: what we did not measure and why.
- A short section for the people who book the trips, in their language rather than ours.
When to run this
The full pass happens before annual planning, which for most clients means six to eight weeks before their booking window opens, and the quick source check happens again whenever a policy or a figure gets updated mid-year. Doing it early is the only version that leaves time to act: a checklist run the week a tender is due produces a document, not a decision.
Report it in plain language
Findings that arrive as an appendix do not change anything, so the summary goes first and the method sits behind it. We write three sentences of what the data shows, one sentence of what we recommend, and a table with sources and dates attached, so a sceptical reader can check the work without asking us for it.
We also record what the numbers cannot answer. A quiet season looks identical to a pricing problem until someone rings the front desk, and saying plainly where the evidence stops is what keeps the rest of the report credible when a person who was not in the room reads it a year later.
Finally we compare against the previous file rather than against memory. Three seasons of the same measure in the same format turns a debate about trends into a two-minute look at a spreadsheet, and it is the only way we can prove a recommendation did what we said it would.