Qualifying travel & hospitality leads before you waste a quarter

Disqualification is the skill

Qualification is usually framed as finding good bookings. It is more useful as the discipline of ending bad ones early. A booking that dies in week two costs almost nothing. The same booking dying at Confirmed has consumed proposals, demos, internal approvals and a slot in your forecast.

An itinerary without an advance is a wish. The advance is the moment a booking becomes revenue.

What to establish before investing

Before a booking advances past the early stages, you want honest answers to four things — and "we will find out later" is a valid answer only once.

• Problem: is the thing you solve actually costing them something measurable
• Authority: who signs, and have you met them
• Process: what has to happen internally for this to be approved
• Timing: what makes this quarter different from the last four

In travel & hospitality the third is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that determines whether Itinerary is reachable at all.

Score it, do not feel it

A simple score beats intuition because it is comparable across reps and across months. Assign points to each criterion, set a threshold below which a booking does not advance, and review the disqualified pile monthly to check the threshold is not simply throwing away business.

The scoring matters less than the consistency. Any reasonable framework applied consistently outperforms an excellent framework applied when someone remembers.

The number that proves it is working

Track win rate on bookings that passed qualification against those that did not. If the two are similar, your qualification is decorative. If qualified bookings convert meaningfully better, the framework is doing real work and the threshold is roughly right.

Also watch average time-to-close. Good qualification shortens it, because the bookings that used to stall for a quarter before dying are now ended in week two.