Slab pricing without the spreadsheet that only one person understands

Every operator has the file. Twelve tabs, colour-coded, built by someone who left in 2023, and consulted every time a group changes size. It works, in the sense that a rope bridge works.

Three decisions, made once

A rate card is not a list of prices. It is three decisions — who the price varies by, when it varies, and what it includes — and once those are explicit, a quotation can price itself without anyone opening a file.

• Vary by pax slab and room type, never by customer. Discounting belongs at the quotation, where it is visible.
• Set seasons on the contract, not in someone's head, so a shoulder-season departure cannot quietly be sold at peak cost.
• State inclusions once per service. "Transfers" means the same thing in every itinerary or it means nothing.

“The margin was never lost on the big negotiations. It went four hundred rupees at a time, on services nobody had priced properly.”

What changes on the quotation

With the slabs structured, changing a party from four to six travellers stops being a rebuild. The itinerary re-prices, the margin recalculates, and the consultant sees the effect before the traveller does — which is the only moment when a discount can be given deliberately rather than discovered later.

22 minmedian build time for a nine-day FIT itinerary

The spreadsheet does not have to die immediately. But every rate you move out of it is a rate that stops depending on one person being reachable.