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Most travel advisors have no idea how much commission they've actually lost to bad reconciliation. Here's why checking your numbers matters as much as tracking your sales.
Stephanie Cannon has been a travel advisor for 20 years and she's also a licensed CPA. So when she says a commission slipped through the cracks in her own business, it's worth listening to.
"I had one from a destination wedding commission that I had to chase down," she said. "I'm thinking, where is this thing? It's been like six months."
The commission had come in through her host agency, but it never got matched to her reservation. Maybe it was off by a penny. Maybe it showed up in a format the system wasn't expecting. Either way, it just sat there until she went looking for it.
"I don't know if it was lost or not identified and it came in, you know, in a different way than was expecting, and it wasn't matched properly," she said.
Here's the part worth sitting with. This isn't a host agency problem and it's not something the host is going to catch for you.
"That's not on the host to figure out who that's for," Cannon said. "That's on the individual advisor."
Most advisors have some way of tracking what they've sold, whether that's a spreadsheet, a notebook, or an entry in their host's portal. But tracking what you sold and tracking what you're actually owed aren't the same job. And the second one is the one that quietly never happens.
"If they're a member of a host agency, the host usually has some place you need to enter your sales to," Cannon explained. But that's not the same as checking whether the money actually shows up. "We're waiting until the commission's actually paid from the host and then it enters whatever they're using for bookkeeping."
That gap in between is where things get lost. A booking gets sold. Months pass. A commission eventually lands, but nobody ever checks it against what was promised. If it's short, or missing, or never arrives at all, nothing flags it.
"Reconciling that doesn't help them reconcile what is owed to them as a travel advisor," Cannon said. "That all has to be done in a commission tracking tool so that they can make sure nothing slips through the cracks, they're not missing something that they're owed and essentially leaving money on the table."
For a solo advisor, one missed commission is annoying. For an agency running a team, it's a much bigger problem.
"It can be in the thousands if they're not keeping track," Cannon said. She also has a way of framing commission that's worth remembering. "Commissions are my accounts receivable, right? That's the money that somebody owes to me for the work I've done. And I don't know many businesses who don't try to collect on their accounts receivable."
That reframe matters. Advisors don't think twice about chasing down an invoice in almost any other part of running a business. But commission tracking often lives in a spreadsheet nobody's actively watching, so that same instinct just doesn't kick in.
The more volume a team is running, the bigger the risk gets. Cannon works with advisors and agencies at every size, and her advice on how often to reconcile changes based on that. "Some of the larger businesses, I recommend weekly, because there's such a high volume of transactions that come in and out of multiple bank accounts, multiple credit cards, that if they get to the end of the month, it can be very overwhelming."
None of this is a quick fix, and Cannon doesn't pretend it is. Building the habit costs time up front, especially for teams that haven't done it before.
We've seen this play out firsthand. One of the first agencies to adopt Travefy's Smart Reconcile tool had over 300 advisors. Getting everyone caught up meant scheduling a dedicated call, getting the team on Zoom, and working through the backlog together. It took hours. But that's roughly what they'd already been spending trying to sort it out manually, without a tool built for the job.
The pattern holds no matter how big the agency is. Reconciliation asks for an upfront investment before it becomes routine. Advisors who build that habit early spare themselves the version of this where it's 18 months of unreconciled bookings and a six-figure agency trying to untangle it after the fact.
You don't need a perfect system to start closing this gap.
Check your host portal against your own sales records, booking by booking, not just at tax time. Flag anything that hasn't paid out within your host's typical window and follow up before it's been six months. If you're still tracking commissions in a general spreadsheet, look at moving that into something built to match bookings to payouts on its own, especially once you're managing more than a handful of active reservations. And if you run a team, build reconciliation into a regular habit instead of an annual scramble. Weekly or monthly, done consistently, beats a full review that never actually happens.
Commission tracking isn't always the exciting part of running a travel business. But it's still your money. As Cannon put it, "I don't know many businesses who don't try to collect on their accounts receivable." Travel advisors shouldn't be the exception.
Want to see how Travefy’s agency tools can help you? Explore the platform.
Listen to this episode of The Lounge featuring Stephanie Cannon for more on tracking your numbers, catching missed commissions, and figuring out what you actually need to earn.
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