Claude Code for DMCs and tour operators

What's on the screen for 60 minutes

1. 1

   Map the work that repeats

   Before anything gets built, the list: requoting the same tailor-made trip at a different group size, the fourth revision of an itinerary, chasing a lodge for a confirmation, the enquiries that landed overnight from three time zones. None of it needs you specifically, and all of it eats the week. Chat gives you answers; an agent goes and does the work, and that difference is what the rest of the hour rests on.

2. 2

   An agent is a new hire, written down

   An agent is a short Markdown file with four things in it: role, skills, tools, context. It maps straight onto hiring a reservations person — the job description, the training, the logins you'd grant, the onboarding pack. I'll write one on screen: for a DMC, the one that costs ground arrangements off an incoming agent brief; for an operator, the one that assembles a trip from several suppliers and puts a selling price on it. Start with one, and let the second earn its place only once the first is reliable.

3. 3

   A skill is your quoting SOP, on the shelf

   How you price off the rates sheet is already a procedure, it's just in someone's head: mark-up bands, single supplements, which supplier gets asked first. Written down it becomes a playbook the agent pulls off the shelf whenever the task matches — agent is who does the work, skill is how it gets done, and the skill is the bit you keep editing. Both sit in one folder with your destination notes, your margin rules and a project file setting the house rules and the folders it's never allowed to open. Installing Claude Code takes about two minutes; that folder is what decides whether you still open this in week two.

4. 4

   One agent enquiry, live on screen

   An enquiry lands from an overseas agent: fourteen days, two families, a dietary requirement, a budget in dollars. I'll wire MCP into a real inbox and a real rates sheet, and be straight about the limit — plenty of reservation systems expose nothing to connect to, so I'll show you how to check yours, and what you do with exports when it doesn't. Then we work the enquiry: the costing, the lodge that can't confirm, the chaser, the reply drafted back in the agent's language. How far we get is the live part.

5. 5

   It's a junior, not a senior

   The first output comes back the wrong shape and close. Cut off from the real rates it will invent a net price that looks entirely plausible, and the fix is to correct the brief — the context file, the skill — never the answer it just handed you. Then the rest of where I've been burned: thin context gives generic work, it scales a mess as happily as a method, and a heavy day of this costs real money in tokens.

Who's running it

Edgar Fluijt

Founder, Marqetlife

In travel marketing since 2015 — built the marketing team at TripMe (now TravelLocal), and worked with PiNCAMP by ADAC, ANWB Camping and Paul Camper. Marqetlife is the growth agency I started because travel companies kept being handed corporate playbooks that don't fit them.