How to cost your first fixed departure before selling a seat
Build your first fixed departure cost plan with group costs, per-person costs, realistic headcounts and a worked example you can reuse for your own batch.
Jökulsárlón · 21:30Your first fixed departure usually begins with an itinerary and a price you think customers will accept. The difficult question arrives later: will that price still work if twelve people book instead of twenty?
Build the cost plan before collecting bookings. You need supplier quotes, a clear description of what you are selling, and three plausible group sizes. You do not need an industry-average margin to begin.
Write the unit beside every amount
“Hotel: ₹4,000” is incomplete. Is that per room, per night, with breakfast, for two adults? “Transport: ₹60,000” needs dates, route, vehicle capacity and inclusions. Record those details before adding numbers.
Use columns for item, supplier, unit, quantity, currency, quoted total, validity date and exclusions. Keep customer selling prices separate. A supplier's quoted cost is not your package price.
IGNOU's tour costing material distinguishes fixed, variable and semi-variable costs. For your working sheet, identify what is charged once for the group, what scales per traveller, and what changes when you cross a capacity threshold.
Build one complete departure example
These are invented teaching figures, not current supplier rates. Assume ₹60,000 of group costs and ₹8,000 of direct cost per paying traveller. Everyone pays the same fare; room occupancy and vehicle size stay constant.
| Paying travellers | Group costs | Traveller costs | Total direct cost | Direct cost per traveller |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | ₹60,000 | ₹96,000 | ₹1,56,000 | ₹13,000 |
| 16 | ₹60,000 | ₹1,28,000 | ₹1,88,000 | ₹11,750 |
| 20 | ₹60,000 | ₹1,60,000 | ₹2,20,000 | ₹11,000 |
A ₹15,000 selling price produces ₹24,000, ₹52,000 or ₹80,000 above these direct costs. That amount still has to support overheads and any selling costs omitted from the example. It is not take-home profit.
Add the lines beginners leave out
Include the tour leader's travel, room and meals unless the supplier explicitly includes them. Record driver allowances, tolls, parking and minimum vehicle billing. Check activity transfers and meals on arrival and departure days. Add your own sales commission and payment collection costs where applicable.
Do not count a complimentary traveller as revenue. If a leader uses one of sixteen usable passenger seats, check the actual capacity available to customers. Do not treat a child without a hotel bed as someone who consumes no transport or meals.
Choose the group size you can defend
Price a cautious case, an expected case and a full case. Then ask which assumptions change between them. Seventeen customers may require a different vehicle; thirteen may create an unpaired room. Rebuild those rows rather than dividing the same total by another number.
Keep tax treatment outside this teaching example and confirm the basis of your real supplier and customer amounts before comparing margins. Mixing inclusive and exclusive figures makes a tidy sheet misleading.
Turn the sheet into a repeatable process
Save the supplier quote and date beside each assumption. Set an internal decision date before major supplier commitments become non-refundable. Have a second person check units and paying headcount before the fare goes public.
Fixed departure costing in Tourify keeps item-level costs, group-size tiers and margin comparisons with the departure. Start with this basic model, then read how much margin to add before choosing the final selling price.