How to evaluate a B2B travel supplier in two weeks
Rate sheets are marketing. Fill rate, amendment behaviour and out-of-hours escalation are the numbers that predict whether you will be happy in a year.
Every supplier will show you a rate comparison in which they win. Here is how to run your own, in a fortnight, on itineraries you actually sell.
Build the test set first
Pull twenty real itineraries from the last quarter — a spread of your genuine mix, not the interesting ones. Include a long-haul return, a multi-city, a short-notice booking, a family room, a shoulder-season city break and something in a destination you sell rarely. Fix the dates so results stay comparable across suppliers.
Measure five things
Price, normalised. Strip out inclusion differences before comparing. Taxes, city levies, resort fees, board basis and baggage all have to match or the comparison is fiction.
Fill rate. Book a handful for real, at your own risk, and see how many confirm at the quoted price. This single number invalidates more rate-sheet claims than anything else you can measure.
Time to quote. Wall-clock minutes from opening the enquiry to having a sendable quote. Include the logins and the copy-paste, because your consultants do.
Amendment behaviour. Change a date on two bookings. Cancel one. Record what it cost, how long it took and how many messages were required.
Out-of-hours reality. Contact support at 2am with a genuine question. Note whether the person answering could act, or only log.
Questions that get non-marketing answers
Ask what their fill rate is on the routes you sell — a supplier that does not measure it will say so by not answering. Ask which of their own suppliers cannot be serviced out of hours. Ask what happens to a booking if their connection to a wholesaler drops mid-transaction. Ask for two agency references at your volume, in your market, and actually call them.
The trap
Do not evaluate on headline rate alone, and do not evaluate on a demo. A supplier that is 3% cheaper and confirms 88% of the time is worse than one that is at market and confirms 99%, because the failures cost you a re-quote, a client conversation and often the booking. Fill rate beats rate sheet, every time.
Put this into practice
AmpleTravel gives you net rates across 500+ suppliers with no sign-up fee and no contract. Create an account and test it against your own itineraries.