Software for allotment and availability management in group travel
If you sell places on group departures, you know one of the bottlenecks isn’t having places under contract — it’s knowing, at any given moment, how many places you can really sell. The stock you hold with the supplier isn’t the same as the departure’s real availability: a return flight with few seats can leave a departure unsold even when rooms are going spare. When that count is kept by hand, in a spreadsheet nobody updates in time, the two expensive errors appear: overbooking, and places left unsold for fear of overshooting.
TourKnife is the group travel software that calculates each departure’s real availability from the stock of all its services, and gives you tools to allocate places among agents through allotment.
And if you’ve already got availability under control but you have other needs — selling online, coordinating suppliers or generating travel documentation — remember that TourKnife does everything a group travel operator needs. Discover all the features.
Stock is not the same as availability
Stock is what you have under contract with each supplier for a date. Availability is what the traveller can actually book — almost always less — and it depends on several services at once. TourKnife calculates availability from the bottom up — from service to activity, from activity to departure — so the departure is capped by its scarcest mandatory service. If the return flight has only twelve places left, the departure offers twelve, even if the hotel can take forty. That real figure is what your team needs to see before confirming one more place.
Real-time availability control, without overbooking
Each booking draws places from the stock of the services that make it up, in real time. You never sell more than you have under contract, because availability is calculated from the real services assigned to each activity, not from a loose number to reconcile by hand. When a booking is cancelled, the places are released automatically. The result is a private inventory that keeps itself balanced, with no manual intervention on every move.
The diagnosis of why a departure won’t sell
The usual question — “I have places, why can’t I book?” — has an immediate answer. TourKnife shows you, departure by departure, which factor is capping the sale: which service has run out of stock, which room option is misconfigured, or which booking consumed the last places. Instead of combing through spreadsheets looking for the discrepancy, you see the bottleneck directly and go to the specific service to fix it.
Opening sales before the stock is closed
Sometimes you want to start selling before closing the places with the supplier — a charter you’re still negotiating, for example. TourKnife allows for this: you can open sales on those places so that bookings come in on request and stay under control, awaiting your confirmation of the stock. When you close the places with the supplier, those bookings follow their normal course. You sell from day one without committing places you don’t yet have.
Allocating places among agents: allotment
When you distribute through agents, you often need to guarantee a block of places to one of them. With allotment, you reserve a set number of a departure’s places exclusively for a specific agent: that agent has its guaranteed places, and the others see reduced availability that excludes what’s committed, so they can’t take it. You can set a real allotment and a different declared allotment — telling the agent fewer places than you actually block, as a safety margin — and see at any moment how many it has sold and how many remain. That way, two agents looking at the same departure can see different availability, each according to its agreement.
Who can sell what: sales restrictions
The flip side of allotment is sales restrictions. Instead of reserving places, they govern whether an agent may or may not sell a product within a date range: you can open a departure exclusively to a group of agents during a specific window, or close the sale of a certain product to a particular agent. It’s the fine control of your sales network: each channel sells exactly what you’ve decided, when you’ve decided it.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the difference between stock and availability?
Stock is what you have under contract with the supplier for a date; availability is what the traveller can actually book. TourKnife calculates availability from the stock of all the departure’s services, capped by its mandatory service with the fewest places.
How does TourKnife prevent overbooking?
Each booking draws places from the real stock of the services that make it up, in real time, and cancellations release them. The system won’t let you sell beyond what’s under contract.
Can I reserve places for a specific agent?
Yes, through allotment: you block a set number of a departure’s places exclusively for one agent, with a real allotment and a declared allotment, and the other agents see reduced availability accordingly.
Can I start selling before the places are confirmed with the supplier?
Yes. You can open sales so that bookings come in on request and stay under control until you confirm the stock; then they follow their normal flow.
Can two agents see different availability for the same departure?
Yes. Over the same stock capacity, each agent’s allotment and sales restrictions apply, so each one sees the availability that corresponds to its agreement.