- 381
- contracts loaded
- 756
- suppliers
- 9,271
- products, every one read back
- 38 days
- first load to last
Where they started
They were paying for two hundred hours a month of outsourced loading, and still behind. Contracts arrived every season and every special, from lodges, camps, hotels, charters and transfer companies across southern Africa.
That's not anyone being slow. That's just how much of it there is. And being behind is the expensive part: when a rate isn't loaded, Tourplan quotes the highest loaded rate plus ten percent.
What arrived
Nobody reformatted anything. The contracts came the way suppliers send them: 278 PDFs, 270 emails with the rates in the body or attached, nine Word documents, six spreadsheets and five zip files. Some PDFs were scans, and some had their rate tables as pictures, which are read too.
What went in
The first load landed on the tenth of September. Within fourteen days, 179 properties had been loaded. The whole book, 381 contracts across 756 suppliers and 9,271 products, was done in 38 days, every rate read back out of Tourplan before it counted.
At the 19 October read, 17,269 rate figures had been compared between contract and live book. 17,257 matched. The twelve that didn't are known and listed, not lost in the book.
A blank field is safe. A number that's confidently wrong is the one that ends up on a quote.
What the checks caught
Most of these looked exactly like success from the outside.
| Found | Why it mattered |
|---|---|
| 81 rate periods in the wrong currency | Three other checks passed it. Caught by refusing to let currency default to anything. |
| 18 single rates accepted and silently discarded | Every call returned success. Only reading the book back showed nothing had landed. |
| 57 options adding 15% VAT on rates that already included it | Found in the live book, corrected, and every corrected option read back. |
| A run that applied one of five closures and reported success | The reason every load is now checked again every hour after it lands. |
| 8 loads that would have lowered a live rate, 11 that would have re-priced existing rates | Stopped before writing. A lower rate is sometimes right, but somebody has to say so. |
| An update that would have deleted live child rates | The new contract didn't restate them, and Tourplan replaces a rate period whole. |
| 163 offers in Tourplan with no contract on file | Bookable, and nobody could say where they came from. Now a list to settle. |
What it asked of them
Where a contract didn't settle something, it became a question with the reason attached, on one shared sheet: does this sheet cover 2027 or only January to April, which cancellation terms apply, is the levy per person or per night, is that a single supplement or a single rate.
602 questions in all. The typical one was closed in under two and a half days, and a question holds only the figures it's about, so the rest of that contract still loads. Every answer is kept and applied the next time the same thing comes up.