From inquiry to deposit, in five phases.
Not a funnel diagram invented for a marketing page. These are the five stages the platform is built around, and the same five it shows an agent on their own sales process screen.
The five phases
A quote moves through these in order. Each one has a screen, a count, and a definition of what has to be true before it advances.
Leads
Capture
Inquiries arrive from web forms, lead-capture pages, manual entry or parsed email, and land in one inbox. Once a lead crosses your response threshold it is flagged, because on a cruise inquiry the first reply usually wins.
Pipeline
Advance
Active quotes on a board, organised by the workflow phases you define rather than a fixed set. Drag a quote forward as the conversation moves.
Proposal
Send
Build from a template, send a link. The client opens it without creating an account, and you can see when they viewed it and whether they approved or asked for changes.
Booking
Confirm
An approved proposal becomes a journey in draft. Take the deposit, confirm the reservations with your suppliers, and it moves to active.
Journey
Deliver
People currently travelling or about to. Documents, day-of-travel messages, and the post-trip survey that fires when the journey completes.
Free during early access, whether you sell solo or run a team of five.
Join the waitlistPhases you define, and a record of every change
“Qualified” means something specific in your business and something else in someone else’s. Phases are yours to name and order, so the board matches how you actually work rather than how a vendor assumed you do.
Every phase change is written to an immutable history — what moved, when, and by whom. For a solo agent that is a memory aid. For an agency of five it is how you resolve “I thought you were handling that.”
Phase transitions can also fire automations: send an email when a quote enters Proposal Sent, create a follow-up task when it sits too long.
Proposals a client can actually open
Built from your own templates, with more than one option where a choice helps — an inside against a balcony, two sailings a fortnight apart. Cruise proposals are comparison documents by nature, and a PDF attachment is a poor one.
The client gets a link. No login, no account, no password reset three days later. You see when it was opened. When they approve, the quote advances on its own, so the board reflects reality without you updating it.
Where the inquiry comes from
Lead capture forms and intake forms are configurable, so the questions you ask up front are the ones that let you quote without a second email. Vendor profiles hold your supplier relationships and the commission terms that go with them, which is what lets a quote carry the right numbers from the start.
Tasks and follow-ups attach to the quote and the contact rather than living in your head or your calendar.
| A general-purpose CRM | Travel Agent Companion | |
|---|---|---|
| Pipeline stages | A fixed set, or custom stages that mean nothing to the rest of the system. | Workflow phases you name and order, with automations that can fire on entry and exit. |
| The proposal | A PDF attachment, or a link that asks the client to create an account. | Multi-option proposals with cabin categories, opened by link with no login, view and approval tracked. |
| Record of changes | A last-modified timestamp. | An immutable phase history — what moved, when, and by whom. |
| After the win | A closed-won deal. Delivery happens somewhere else. | The quote becomes a journey carrying its cabin, deck, deposit and final-payment date. |
Why a general-purpose CRM can't do this
A generic pipeline is genuinely fine at the shape of this problem — stages, drag, close. That part is not the differentiator, and pretending otherwise would be overselling it.
What a generic CRM cannot do is carry the cruise through. Its proposal template has no concept of a stateroom category. Its closed-won deal does not become a journey with a cabin, a deck and a final payment date. The handoff from “sold” to “now deliver it” is where the cruise detail gets lost, because that is the point where a general CRM stops and the spreadsheet starts.
Keep reading
- Reservations & journeys
Cruise bookings stored as cruises — cabins, decks, ports, deadlines.
- Commissions & reporting
What you're owed, what arrived, and what's late.
Move a quote forward without retyping it.
Travel Agent Companion is in early access. Join the waitlist and we’ll email you when it opens up.