High Maintenance vs High Value: Auditing your Agents as a Local Operator or Accommodation

In previous episodes, we discussed why it is important to carefully choose your supply chain partners to protect your business contracts.

In this episode, Samantha Smits shifts the focus and looks at international agents from a local business perspective. Learn how to review your partnerships in a practical, data driven way. Discover how to spot agents that take up too much time with endless emails and low profit margins, so you can focus on the partnerships that truly add value to your business.

Connect with Samantha Smits on LinkedIn or her website.

Are you a tourism CEO looking to protect your international contracts and cut daily operational costs? Download your free copy of the B2B Tourism Blueprint here to stop cash leaks, satisfy international agents, and stay ahead of strict compliance rules.

Ready for direct advice? You can plan a Match Call with me here.

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The Sustainability Edge is hosted by Samantha Smits, your guide to turning sustainability into a competitive edge.

Transcript

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How much time do you spend for agents and how much money is in your pocket at the end of it? Because then you can compare, wow, this agent takes me much less time, but I still get more. Hi, I'm Samantha Smith and welcome back to the Sustainability Edge, the tourism podcast. No Yargon, no fluff. We're breaking down sustainability and especially how to turn sustainability in a practical tool that gives you more profit, more time, stuff that's staying, and a business you can be proud of. Let's get started. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the podcast. Over the last few episodes, we've already talked about this European directive and the risk and the need to look at the suppliers you're working with to ensure that they're not a liability to you, but actually an asset, so that they don't have negative impact on your business, but come with positive impact on your business. And I've mainly discussed this from the view of agent to supplier, and a little bit the other way around. But today for this episode, I want to flip it around fully. So dedicate the full episodes where we're looking at you, the local operator, the local DMC, the lodge owner, accrediter, you in the position of authority. And why? I mean, I've discussed before why it's a risk that you could lose a partner if you don't fall in line and have the sustainability data ready. But also what here is the benefit for you to more carefully select who you want to work together with, what agent you want to work together with, because remember, there's two sides to the coin. You can also choose who you want to work together with. You don't have to accept anyone just for the sake of money, because it will not always be the most decision, even financially. So we're going to talk about how you can look at your B2B relationships and look at the difference between a high maintenance partner who's wasting your energy or a high value agent in this case who will respect your business standards. Let's go. So talking about the high maintenance partner, the agent that is taking you tons of energy, time, money, and so forth. You you've experienced such a kind of agent. The agent who will micromanage every detail of the booking. You end up in a 30 email thread for one booking where even your profit margin is not even that high. It's pretty low margin. They ask for a lot of custom changes, endless manual adjustments, question your pricing, and they take a lot of hours from your team, your back office people. And this is default per booking. So then at the end, when you look at your total turnover at the end, you might think they are one of your best partners because their their name is shown up a lot in your email inbox. And maybe you have a high volume bookings from them, as in you have many bookings from them, but then with a low margin. But then when you look at it, they are not bringing in the most turnover or profit in your business, they are just taking most of your time, which is not a good combination, to be honest. And of course, I mean when you start your business, if for me, when I was in my first year, first months of entrepreneur, you want to say yes to every opportunity, or in your case, you want to say yes to any agent because any agent is better than none. You just want to get the business off the ground, fully, fully understood. But you do reach a point where you have to look past volume and look into quality. So do not look at how many the quantity, but look at how good the quality is. So you rather have a few bookings that are very good and bring you a bigger margin of profit than having a lot of bookings, but they're all very, very small in what they bring in your pocket. Because at the end of the day, both of these situations could technically give you the same amount of money, but one is gonna cost you much more time, energy, and will to live than the other will. So here, not every booking is a good booking. We have quality bookings and yeah, not such good or strong quality bookings. You really have to look into how much administration is a partner costing you, and beyond the relationship as in oh we had a beer at the at the conference, how easy is it doing business with them? Because they're looking the same way as you. Remember, as discussed in the previous episodes, if you are becoming difficult for them to do relate to do business with because you cannot give them the sustainability data that they need, they will move on. So why wouldn't you do the same? You can also be more critical of who you're working with rather than accepting just everyone. I mean, also the other way around, there are tons of agents and there's also tons of DMCs, and for everyone there is a match. Absolutely. And think about you'd rather have that you have the same sales member spending good time on a premium booking that is going to get more money into your account, rather than having several few sales employees spending weeks on the low quality ones and having your entire yeah, that you don't have the space to take on even other agents because they're all busy working on the low quality one. So here it's when you're when your office, your team is constantly reacting to the loudest, least profitable voices and agents in your network, it is impossible to achieve this level that you want to get towards of being sustainable in all the ways it means of sustaining business, community, and yourself. And that means learning how to say no. That is also something we discussed before, and that anyone in business, me too, learns more and more every day to not say yes to every opportunity, but to clearly audit the ones that are best for you. So then how are you going to start making these decisions? Here you kind of have to make some of your own criteria or your own baseline for your partners. Look directly what what volume what volume is a specific agent giving you. So the amount of bookings or guests compared to the amount of change requests or the amount of emails you get. You really would have to come up with a metric, how much time do you spend per agent and how much money is in your pocket at the end of it? Because then you can compare, wow, this agent takes me much less time, but I still get more, I get more into my business. Well, being a sustainable business, those are the interesting ones that you would like more of, or since they take little time, you're going to spend more time on them. So technically, this means if you have one agent that is not taking you 30 emails, that is not taking all of your time, but is giving you very high quality booking compared to two or three agents that are taking many emails, many changes, a lot of nagging, a lot of headache, and it doesn't even result in a lot of profit. It is much more profitable to spend the time that you're spending on those three separate bad quality agents and spend that on even that one bigger agent and just telling them you can host more of their bookings because you have more time, you have more capacity, or to take on another high quality like them. It'll do much more for your bid in the business, and especially if you are doing sustainability and take sustainability certification seriously, it also increases the positive impact you have on your destination and on the community and yourself and does everyone involved. Just a better, bigger win for everyone to work with the agents that care about this and are less of a headache to you. And here I also want to say, and I also said this during my speaking session of the Sustainable Tourism Africa Summit at Lake Navasha in 2026 at the time of recording this. Be the one that calls your agents first. Because we keep warning that with these new directives in the EU, that at some point you might receive a call from your agents because they're going to ask you for all this data that you might not have yet. But why do you not call them first? And do you lay your requirements on the table? And do you tell them that you are ready for this and ask you, but are you? Again, you are allowed to grab this power position yourself as well. You do not have to be so dependable on these agents because you can make a lot of these choices yourself as well, especially when you are first on this. Because here, a high value partner will match your logic, it will be easy to work with them, you have the same values, you respect each other's workflows, and they really yeah, there's this bigger understanding is going to be beneficial for both of you. So here again, honestly, if you do not have it yet, make a list of all the agents that you have and internally score them based on the time they take, based on the relationship, based on the money they bring in, based on the sustainability values, you will see who deserves more of your attention than the others. Really. And what you also see a lot in the industry, I mean some people are very competitive with each other, but a lot of people also have friends. So 1000% sure when one of your best agents that you have a good relationship with doesn't take you a lot of time, you have the same sustainability values, I'm 1000% sure they will know someone that operates very similar to them. And then you can just ask outright that you love working with them and you think that it's better that you would love to have a similar relationship with one of their friends, and just ask if they have someone you can position test. Is there someone else that one of your friends that can help as well? Because people love helping each other, right? So here as a sustainable tourism business, you are the destination specialist, you carry the local knowledge, you manage anything on the ground. So you are here by removing the low return, way too much high effort relationships, you're sending a very powerful signal to anyone involved that your business has values and stands on business, and that people have to actually match what you are wishing, except of the other way around. You see, it's too much that DMCs and local accommodations are changing the ways just to match the operators. But 1000% you also are in power. Here, sustainability has like two sides as a management standard, because it requires you to protect your business energy to sustain your business, but also that of the community and the destination. And doesn't matter where this comes from, if it comes from outrageous bad clients or just bad B2B accounts or bad agents, you have the power to do something about this. So when you choose to work only with agents and partners that value the same fellows as you and your professional way of working, your entire business is going to change, including the people working for you. So if if all of this, if this topic or anything I've said during this episode has triggered something within you, may it be a thought, feedback, even a disagreement, anything that now is racing through your mind, do reach out to me. Go down into the show notes, find a way to go to my website and to book a introduction call with me, find me on LinkedIn, and share any of your thoughts or feedback with me. I would love to hear them. And if this is something you're struggling with at the moment, we can discuss and see how I can help you move forward. And that's it for now. See you in the next episode. Thank you for listening and congratulations on investing your time today to think strategically about your future, to make sure you never miss a step to understand sustainability better, how to grow your competitive edge. Follow the podcast right now, and if this was helpful, please leave a five star rating. It will help other people like you to find these tools. I'm Samantha Smith, and I'll see you in the next episode.