“Where’s My Commission



“Where’s My Commission?”

Hi everyone! Welcome to our WebEx class, “Where’s My Commission?” We have designed this class to help you navigate the world of revenue generation and commission payouts. That’s just a fancy way of saying helping you get paid! We look forward to paying commissions out to our hard working independent agents!

For those of you who have never received a commission check or are new to Tickets and Tours, our discussion tonight will teach you the steps to start earning and receiving commissions. For our more seasoned agents, our hope is to provide insight into how commissions are paid out by suppliers and how that money gets into your hands.

We will be covering three general topics tonight:

How commissions are earned

How commissions are paid by the suppliers and

How to receive a check for the commissions you’ve earned

HOW TO EARN

Let’s start with how you, the independent agent, can earn commissions. Most independent travel agents or ITA’s (as I’ll refer to them for the remainder of our chat) joined Pulaski Tickets and Tours to enjoy their own 100% commission free travel and to earn revenue by booking travel for friends, family and clients. Depending upon your individual contract, you may receive up to 90% of the commission you generate on this type of booking.

Commissions are generated in a myriad of ways: car rentals, hotels, vacations packages, cruises, travel insurance, rail tickets and even tickets to some shows and attractions. They can be booked by telephone, on-line thru our website, on-line thru individual supplier websites, such as or , or thru an agent-specific software system such as Sabre or Amadeus. The key to generating the commission is to ensure that every booking is noted with the supplier using our agency CLIA or IATA number. This number, 335-30556, is our industry identifier so that suppliers know which agency to issue commission payments to. It is important that any time you make a booking you ensure our agency ID number is attached to your reservation. This is the only way to be certain that Pulaski Tickets & Tours will be paid.

Sometimes, when you make a booking with a smaller supplier, they will not use our CLIA number for tracking in their internal system. For this reason, it is important to double check that they have our agency name, address and telephone number. Even when you are booking with a large supplier, it is always a good practice to verify that our agency information is correct. One item to note, the agency address is Pulaski Tickets & Tours main office in Pulaski, NY, not your business address.

HOW COMMISSIONS ARE PAID

Once travel is completed, suppliers will issue payments to Tickets & Tours. Sometimes these payments come thru consolidators, sometimes directly from the suppliers themselves. Some companies, such as Mariott, make it a practice to pay within a couple of weeks of travel completion. Other companies take up to a year to pay out commissions. It is important to realize that as a general practice commissions are not paid out by suppliers until travel is completed, as opposed to when travel is booked. In turn, Tickets & Tours does not payout commissions to you until after travel is complete.

For example, if you were to book a hotel room for yourself at the Orlando Hilton on April 1, 2008, arriving Jan 20, 2009 departing Jan 23, 2009, and your commission would be received by Tickets & Tours after Jan 23, 2009. Notice that nearly a year will have passed from the booking date before the hotel even considers paying out the commission.

Most suppliers pay commissions out to the booking agency within 90 days of travel, however, there is no hard and fast rule. There are some companies who may pay commissions once travel is paid in full, even if the departure date is months away. Be sure to keep this in mind when you’re checking your files to see if we have sent you a check for a particular booking.

As you book more travel, you will discover which companies are quick to pay and which tend to take their time. Remember that it is Pulaski Tickets & Tours policy to pay out commissions to ITAs within 30 days of receipt of commissions or completion of travel, whichever is later. This is to prevent dealing with something called commission recalls. A commission recall will occur when a supplier has paid out a commission and then the travel is changed or cancelled. The corporate office then receives a bill for that commission. By waiting to pay you after travel is complete it guarantees that you will never receive a bill from our office for commissions you must repay.

Has anyone ever made a booking to have it show up as cancelled, even when you are certain your client took the trip? This can happen if, after you have made a booking, any changes are made at the point-of-sale with the supplier – such as at the car rental counter or hotel front desk. Many suppliers will cancel the original booking and rebook the service, deleting our agency information. When we receive commission reports, they will show that the booking was cancelled and no revenue was generated. Examples of changes include: room upgrades, car upgrades and date changes. To prevent this when taking a personal trip, be sure to confirm with the counter associate that your agency information is included on the new reservation. As for client travel, our best advice is to find out in advance through interviews with your customer exactly what they want. Then be sure to book rooms and equipment that satisfies their needs, preventing a desire to upgrade at the point-of-sale.

HOW COMMISSIONS GET TO YOU

We’ve learned how to earn commissions and how those commissions get from the supplier to our agency. Now the important part: how do these commissions get to you?

Let’s review for a minute the booking process using an imaginary client, The Smiths. Mr. & Mrs. Smith want to take their two children on a family vacation to Orlando. You’ve interviewed them and know that they want a suite near Disney World and a minivan rental for the week. You’ve researched on line to find the best rate available at the hotel and car rental company. You’ve booked the reservation and made sure that each supplier has all of your agency information. You’re sure that you’ve gotten the Smiths exactly what they want, so you’re confident that they will not be making any changes or upgrades once they arrive in Orlando. Many agents stop here. They assume that all of their work is complete and that a commission check will arrive in their mailbox within a few weeks.

However, there is still one more important step in the process, without which that much anticipated check will not come. You must submit a commission tracking (booking) form to our corporate office.

The commission tracking form also referred to as the booking form, can be found under the agent tools section of your CTC mail web page. Let’s take a minute and I’ll show you where it’s located. Notice that there are two options for completing this form, on-line or manual. The on-line form is a much quicker way to get the information to us, but you are always welcome to print out a blank form, complete it by hand and fax or mail it in to our office. It isn’t necessary to fill out every single blank on the booking form. At a minimum we need your name, diamond number, passenger’s name, the dates of travel, destination and supplier. Although confirmation numbers and prices are very helpful to have, they are not mandatory.

The idea behind the commission tracking form is to give us a starting place to look for who the money belongs to when it arrives in our office. Nothing is more frustrating than receiving a commission check and not being able to pass it on to the agent who earned it. Here are a couple of samples of how commission reports come into our office from suppliers. The really good ones, like this report from a hotel consolidator, give us tons of information: guest name, dates of stay, brand and location of hotel, total rate charged and total commission paid. Others will only provide part of this information. Here are a couple of examples of some that aren’t so easy to decipher. Some even come with only a first name and an amount. This is why the commission tracking forms are critical. Without them, we have no idea who to pay. And as I said before, paying you is one of the best parts of my job.

Please note that a booking form is no longer required if we book personal travel for you. It is also not required if one of Tickets & Tours in-house agents books travel for your clients on your behalf. An internal database search will easily locate the agent affiliated with each of these types of bookings. The only time a booking form is required is if YOU book travel for your client. Without a booking form for this type of business we would have no idea who to pay.

Now, let’s assume you’ve completed all of the agent steps to ensure you’ll receive your commission. You’ve qualified your client and booked with a supplier who meets their needs. You’ve completed and submitted a commission tracking form to our office. Now you wait.

Earlier we touched on how long it takes for commissions to be paid out by the supplier. I can’t stress enough that this is a very, very fluid system. While some suppliers pay out within a couple of weeks of travel, others can take months. So be prepared to wait a while.

Once the check arrives in our office, I search through the commission tracking forms on file in to see if we have a match. If so, I pull the form and calculate the commission based upon the individual agent contract. Although commissions arrive daily in our office, it is the policy of Pulaski Tickets and Tours to pay commissions out on the first of the month. Once checks are generated, they are mailed to you along with a copy of the tracking form you submitted. This will help you reconcile your own records to keep an eye on what commissions have been paid and which are still due you. Commissions for which we do not receive a booking form are kept on file for six months. After that, we assume that the agent doesn’t want the commission and it is retained by Tickets & Tours.

Any questions?

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