Trip support is a margin business with a lot of small lines. A single leg can carry ten or more charges: handling, fuel, landing and parking fees, permits, catering, crew hotel, transport and your own fee. Price them loosely and the margin disappears; price them slowly and the client books elsewhere. This guide sets out a pricing model that is fast and complete.
Separate three kinds of line
- Pass-through costs. Airport and authority fees you pay and recharge at cost, sometimes with a disbursement fee.
- Supplier services. Handling, fuel, catering, hotels and transport bought from suppliers, recharged with a mark-up.
- Your own services. Permit arrangement, flight planning, briefing packs and 24/7 coordination, priced as fees.
Keeping them separate makes quotes easier to explain and margin easier to measure.
Build rate cards, not memories
A rate card is a price list for a supplier at an airport, by aircraft category and season, with a validity date. With rate cards in place, a quote is a lookup, not a research task. Record:
- Supplier, airport (ICAO) and service
- Price by aircraft category or MTOW band
- Currency and validity dates
- Extras: out-of-hours call-out, GPU per hour, lavatory and water service
Apply mark-up rules consistently
Set mark-ups as rules, not decisions made per quote. A typical structure is a default percentage per service type, overridden per client or region where you have agreed different terms. Fixed minimums protect you on low-value lines.
Quote from the trip, invoice from the actuals
The quote is your estimate when the trip is requested. The invoice should be built from what actually happened: the extra night at the hotel, the second catering order, the late arrival that triggered an out-of-hours charge. If the quote and invoice come from the same service lines, nothing is forgotten.
In Aviagrid, services on the trip are priced from rate cards, mark-up rules are applied, and the invoice is built from completed services and synced to your accounting system. See quotes and invoicing.
Check margin per service
Once a month, look at margin per client, per airport and per service. Low margin at one airport usually means an out-of-date rate card. Low margin with one client usually means a mark-up rule that no longer matches the agreement.