What the CMA Headline Pricing Guidance Means for Tour Operators

The UK travel industry has reached an important moment.

The CMA Headline Pricing Guidance is changing how holidays must be priced and presented to travellers in the UK. Issued by the Competition and Markets Authority, the guidance aims to eliminate “drip pricing” and ensure travellers understand the full cost of their holiday before making a booking.

At its core,if a traveller must pay a cost in order to take the holiday, that cost should be reflected in the price shown at the outset.

In regulatory terms, this means the Total Holiday Cost becomes the Headline Price.

For tour operators, complying with the CMA Headline Pricing Guidance is not simply a legal exercise. It quickly becomes a question of systems — how to calculate the full cost of a holiday, keep margins intact, and present the result clearly to the traveller.

What the CMA Headline Pricing Guidance Means for Tour Operators

The CMA’s guidance is designed to eliminate what regulators call drip pricing — where unavoidable costs only appear later in the booking process.

Coverage from Travel Weekly has highlighted the urgency of the situation, urging travel businesses to review how holidays are priced and quoted.

Under the new expectations, the headline price of a holiday should include unavoidable charges such as:

• tourist taxes
• resort fees
• destination charges
• mandatory hotel fees
• port or airport taxes

Even if those amounts are paid locally and never pass through the tour operator’s accounts.

The guidance also sits alongside the existing Package Travel Regulations (PTRs), reinforcing the broader principle that travellers should be able to understand the full cost of a holiday before making a purchase decision.

For many operators, this represents less of a legal hurdle and more of an operational rethink.

Pricing a Holiday Has Never Been One Number

Anyone who works in tailor-made travel knows that pricing a trip is rarely simple.

Behind every proposal sits a mixture of supplier costs, destination taxes, service margins and local charges. In places like the Maldives or parts of the Caribbean, the local tax rules alone can make consultants perform daily mental gymnastics.

The CMA guidance simply brings those layers into clearer view.

From a practical standpoint, operators now need to manage three distinct pricing views.

This structure protects consumers from surprises while still allowing travel businesses to manage their commercial reporting accurately.

The challenge is that many travel teams still try to manage these distinctions manually.

When Pricing Lives in Spreadsheets

For consultants building complex itineraries, pricing can already be the most exhausting part of the job.

Hotels introduce new taxes. Local authorities adjust tourism levies. Resorts add environmental fees. Suddenly the consultant is recalculating figures, checking supplier notes and hoping the proposal still adds up correctly.

The result isn’t just inconvenience — it becomes an operational bottleneck.

Consider a simple scenario.

A £2,000 luxury stay in Dubai shouldn’t suddenly become £2,150 at the check-in desk because tourism dirhams were not clearly reflected in the original quotation.

Moments like that — when a traveller realises the holiday costs more than expected — are exactly what regulators are trying to prevent.

But they also highlight the gap between how holidays are sold and how pricing systems actually work.

Why This Is Really a Technology Question

The CMA guidance doesn’t just introduce regulatory expectations; it quietly exposes the limits of outdated systems.

When pricing data lives across spreadsheets, supplier emails and consultant memory, transparency becomes fragile. Teams rely on experience and caution rather than clear operational structure.

And when consultants are juggling several itineraries at once, mistakes become almost inevitable.

At best, that leads to awkward explanations during the booking process.

At worst, it risks eroding trust or attracting regulatory attention.

This is where a purpose-built Travel CRM begins to bridge the gap.

Where a Travel CRM Makes the Difference

A modern Travel CRM allows pricing data to be structured in the same way trips are actually built.

Mandatory local charges can sit alongside suppliers or destinations.
They can automatically appear when a hotel or activity is added to an itinerary.
And they can be separated from the operator’s own revenue and profit calculations.

The traveller sees a transparent total price.

Meanwhile, the operator’s margins remain clean and accurate.

Just as importantly, consultants no longer need to perform manual calculations every time they build a trip. The system quietly handles the complexity behind the scenes, allowing the team to focus on designing remarkable journeys rather than wrestling with numbers.

The Cost of Ignoring the Shift

While the CMA guidance focuses on consumer protection, the commercial implications are just as important.

If pricing transparency is handled poorly, travel businesses risk:

• confusing or frustrating clients during the booking process
• losing trust at the quotation stage
• damaging their reputation through avoidable surprises

In a competitive travel market, even small moments of friction can influence whether a traveller confirms their booking or continues shopping elsewhere.

Transparency is no longer just regulatory housekeeping. It is becoming a competitive expectation.

Bridging the Gap Between Transparency and Operations

At Sugati, we believe travel companies should spend their time designing exceptional journeys rather than navigating unnecessary operational complexity.

Our Travel CRM for Tour Operators was designed specifically to structure supplier pricing, local taxes and itinerary proposals in one place, helping teams present clear and transparent pricing to travellers.

That includes helping operators:

• manage supplier pricing in a structured system
• capture mandatory destination charges alongside core services
• present compliant headline pricing within proposals and itineraries
• maintain accurate revenue and margin reporting internally

When pricing logic lives inside the CRM, transparency becomes a natural outcome rather than an additional administrative burden.

The Direction of Travel

The CMA’s Headline Pricing Guidance marks an important step toward greater clarity in how holidays are priced and sold.

But in many ways, it simply reflects something travellers have expected for years: honesty and transparency from the outset.

For travel businesses, the real question is not whether transparent pricing will become the norm.

It already has.

The real question is whether the systems behind the scenes are ready to support it.

Is Your Pricing Workflow Ready for the CMA Headline Pricing Guidance?

Many tour operators in the UK are now reviewing whether their current systems can support the new pricing transparency requirements.

If your team is still relying on spreadsheets or manual calculations, it may be worth reviewing whether your Travel CRM is structured to manage:

• mandatory local charges
• supplier-level taxes
• clear itinerary pricing
• compliant headline holiday pricing

To help with that process, we’ve created a simple CMA Pricing Readiness Checklist for Tour Operators.

Or, if you prefer a quick conversation, you can book a short pricing workflow review with the Sugati team to see how a structured Travel CRM can remove the manual work from proposals and itineraries.

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Taking payments shouldn’t be a hassle—no matter where your clients are. That’s why Sugati offers robust travel payment solutions, integrating with multiple payment gateway providers to give you flexibility and peace of mind when handling transactions across different regions.

With trusted partners like Stripe, Flywire, Checkout, TrustPayments, Ecommpay, and Authorize.Net, you can provide a secure and flexible payment experience tailored to the travel industry. Whether you’re processing deposits, handling final payments, or managing refunds, Sugati ensures transactions are smooth and reliable.

Our travel payment solutions allow clients to pay directly through your branded interactive itineraries. This eliminates unnecessary steps in the booking process, making it easier for customers to confirm their trips. A seamless booking and payment experience builds trust, enhances client satisfaction, and increases repeat business.

By integrating payments within your existing CRM, Sugati reduces manual effort, minimises errors, and ensures compliance with industry regulations. Whether your business operates locally or globally, our technology supports secure transactions across multiple currencies and payment methods, helping you get paid faster and with less hassle.

Why Choose Sugati for Travel Payment Processing?

• Support for multiple trusted payment gateways

• Secure and PCI-compliant transactions

• Direct payments through branded itineraries

• Reduced manual admin and improved efficiency

• Faster processing and reconciliation of payments

Discover how Sugati’s travel payment solutions can streamline your operations and enhance your clients’ booking experience.

Get in touch today.

See what our clients from around the world are saying about Sugati! Click here to read their reviews.

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Sugati is going to be at Travel Technology Europe (TTE) 2020.

In 2020, Sugati returns to the Travel Technology Europe (TTE). Sugati has experienced an amazing growth exposure in 2019. We are going to maintain that momentum and accelerate our growth into 2020 and beyond. We are raring to showcase much improved Sugati to the potential clients, partners and suppliers at TTE 2020, happening on the 26th and 27th of February at the Olympia London.

Sugati Travel CRM is a really powerful travel agent software solution built on top of Salesforce CRM, a platform that we love, to provide key travel-centric features.

Our CEO, Tin Aung, our Head of Project Deliveries, Ian Fairhurst and our Business Development Manager, Amir Emami-Zadeh are going to be at our stand, T82. Come and talk to us to learn more about what Sugati has to offer.

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Those challenges are definitely not the only ones for travel businesses, however, they are definitely painful for the agents and need to be fixed.

With Sugati, the best CRM solution for the travel sector, you will be able to visualise all your activity in one go! Sugati provides a fully integrated cloud-based CRM solution EXCLUSIVELY for the travel trade. Our Travel CRM system is responding directly to all your challenges and is including many features such as:

• Generate reports in less than 2 minutes
• Update the individual objectives instantly
• Manage your marketing campaigns KPIs
• Deal with supplier payments rules
• Manage client preferences
• Evaluate easily your keywords performances, and so on…

Sugati is more than a product, it’s a technology platform. We are by your side as a Partner. Our team understands your issues and questions and build the CRM software for you. From a travel and technology background, we have built Sugati on top of the powerful Salesforce.com, to answer to your challenges. What a fantastic new technology solution for both Tour operators and Travel agents. Book a demo today and find the perfect CRM solution for your travel needs! 

Be the most dangerous competitor thanks to your fitted CRM software. Make the difference and move to the next step!

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Find the right solution for your travel business isn’t easy!

There are many CRM solutions available for travel agents and tour operators, and it can be overwhelming deciding which is right for your travel business. From our conversations with clients and travel industry experts, we have come up with a list of the key features you should look for when selecting your CRM as a travel agent or tour operator:

1. Use a cloud-based CRM software to avoid issues if there’s a disconnection.
2. It matters to clients if their itinerary and other documents look good, so make sure you have the ability to create a beautiful itinerary and other documents that look great (like Sugati can!).
3. Choose a CRM for travel agency or tour operator that can set up workflows and tasks to make your life easier!
4. Find a multi-feature, easy to use reporting function to help you to understand your business well.
5. Use a CRM solution which has pre-defined fields. This avoids confusion and issues if people put in different terms into free type fields, and it allows for easy reporting.
6. Look for a CRM system which has the flexibility to change setups and formatting, for titles and names, for example. This is easy to do in Salesforce.
7. Find a system which can take your data through Mailclean automatically, as you can with Sugati Travel CRM based on Salesforce.
8. Choose a solution which provides instructions on how to handle an enquiry.
9. Find a solution which has a clear, easy to use interface.
10. Find a system which integrates with other solutions, such as MailChimp, Salesforce Pardot or PayPal, for example.
11. Look for excellent customer service! Personalised, friendly and attentive customer service makes a huge difference.

If you’d like to find out more about Sugati or book a demo, please get in touch!

Find out what our clients say about us here!

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Sugati is proud to announce the new Tour Booking System Features…

Sugati Travel CRM has just launched some exciting new features to make tour booking even better! Every tour operator software is different, and we make sure Sugati is the best CRM for the travel industry, we upgrade our CRM solution for you, considering our clients needs as well as challenges faced by tour operators and travel agents. Here is below some of the features we have recently launched!

Some of the features include:

• Fixed departure tours: An evolution from tailor-made tours. With this new tour feature, you can set up a tour template, and from this we can clone a specific departure date, to create multiple tours and save you time and effort. 
• Tour search: You can search on our tour booking software for a specific tour or for a specific customer. We allow you to customise many aspects to suit your travel agency or tour operator needs – continent, budget, country, nights and more. You can change your customised settings without Sugati doing this for you, making the process quick and efficient as well as perfectly tailored to your requirements.
• Discount codes: Create discount codes for a marketing campaign, with provisos such as an expiry date, validity for certain individuals only and named codes. You can also offer discount codes in the form of ‘early bird’ pricing, set either as a percentage or as a figure.
• Manage your waiting list: Sugati, travel CRM, will automatically manage your tour waiting list according to the rules you set. Customers can sign up for a tour on the chance the tour operator will secure more spaces, and either pay a deposit or not according to what you wish to happen.
• Tour manifest: This is all in one place with Sugati, and with the click of a button, you can send the manifest. With the press of a button, the manifest is generated as an attachment which you can send to suppliers. It’s that easy!

This feature update contains many other exciting new aspects. Get in touch or request a demo to find out more!

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Is a cloud-based CRM system a good idea?

Why should you use a cloud-based CRM solution, and what should you look for when choosing a provider? If you are still using a CRM solution which requires you to download software to access customer or booking information, I recommend you seriously consider moving away from your system. Gone are the days where you need to download, say, Citrix, to access your server.

A major issue with using software which you need to download is that if your CRM system crashes, you can’t access your CRM tool. Some of our clients moved to Sugati CRM from our competitors for exactly this reason – It costs time, money and productivity every time your system crashes.

The technology market is increasingly moving away from downloadable software. Facebook, and Google, for example, don’t require users to download any software to engage with their solution.

Our recommendations

So if you want a cloud-based CRM solution, I recommend you make sure you can access your:

• Marketing data to enable marketing automation
• Sale data to deal with enquiries, quotes, booking, inventory and supplier information
• Service information to deal with client complaints and additional requests
• Client and supplier communities (log in areas) allowing you to engage with your clients and suppliers. The idea is the client can amend their details, make changes to their bookings and view their travel documents. Suppliers can update their inventory, rate requests, monitor their payments and upload their invoices.

This will help you to achieve the best possible levels of success with your travel cloud-based CRM. Sugati is a mid-office CRM solution designed for both travel agents and tour operators. We help the travel trade understand why technology helps the travel sector. If you’d like to learn more about how Sugati can help your travel agency, please request a demo today.

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