Travel agency software in the Philippines, a buyer's guide.

A booking starts as a question on Messenger or the website and ends weeks later at the airport. In between are a quotation, revisions, a deposit, documents to chase and a final payment. The system has to know where every trip is.

• Inquiries for packages, custom trips, visas and tickets, with the passengers on each.
• Tour packages with itineraries, inclusions, exclusions and a costing behind the selling price.
• Quotations that are approved, printed and sent, and revised without losing the old version.
• A statement of account per booking, with deposits, payments and the balance due before departure.
• A checklist of travel documents per traveller, and a private way for the client to send them.
• Visa applications with the documents reviewed and the date filed.

Under the Tourism Act of 2009 (RA 9593), travel and tour services are tourism enterprises, and the Department of Tourism accredits them under its own rules. Accreditation is renewed periodically, alongside the business permit and BIR registration. A system should keep these documents and their expiry dates in one place.

The travel tax under PD 1183, as amended, is collected by the Tourism Infrastructure and Enterprise Zone Authority (TIEZA) from Filipinos and certain residents leaving the country. There is a full rate and a reduced rate, which depend on the class of travel, and exemptions for groups such as overseas Filipino workers and some minors.

Many airline tickets include it, but an agency that sells packages or collects the tax itself has to compute it per passenger and show it apart from its own fees. A system should keep the rates as setup, not as figures in the program.

With a spreadsheet and a chat app, quotations are copies of copies, payments are checked against bank screenshots, and a missing passport is found the week of the flight. A system ties the inquiry, the quotation, every payment and every document to one booking, with a trail of who changed a price.

Passports, birth certificates and bank documents are personal information under RA 10173. They should be stored with the booking, seen only by the staff who need them, and not left in chat threads and shared drives.

Payments, supplier costs and commissions should post to the books, so the daily sales register and the trial balance come from the same records the tour desk works in. An agency with its own staff payroll may want HR and payroll in the same system.