B: Cancelling a Tour & Closing Out Ops/Booking Records

(Closing out Booking and Ops Records)

In the event it becomes obvious that a tour is not viable and needs to be cancelled, there are two ways to go. One involves offering an alternative tour and hopefully transferring your booked passengers; or cancelling and refunding them.

If there is a possibility that a cancellation penalty will be assessed, the first thing you want to do is make sure the penalty date(s) and amount(s) are correct on the Deadlines tab in TM.

Cancelling the Bookings without Offering an Alternative

With the TM record open, click the navigational button labeled “Cancel Tour”. You will be double checked on your decision to proceed, and will then be asked if you want to cancel the Bookings for all related travelers; respond “Yes”.

Navigate to the Booking records from there and, on the “Refunds” tab, double check that an appropriate penalty has been calculated. If the figures look correct, proceed to the Refunds tab and enter the details of the check that has been issued; or, in the event the refund is being done via credit card, go to the Payments tab to action that.

Once the refund is processed, go to the “Booking Reports” menu choice and from the “Doc Queue” tab, select “Load Refund Letter”. From the “Doc Queue” portal to the right, click the “Print or Email” button to generate a letter that you will print if enclosing a refund check, or email if the refund is being processed by credit card.

Cancelling the Bookings/Offering an Alternative Tour

If you are going to offer the option of a transfer, then decline this invitation to cancel all related Bookings and simply cancel the tour.

Next, move through the Bookings and cancel them one by one. Follow the process as explained on Page 33, “Canceling an Entire Booking Record or One Individual Traveler”. Your response to the prompt will be that you want to “Rebook”.

Regardless of how you decide to deal with the Booking records, once the script to cancel the tour is invoked, the status of the TM record will go to “Non-Op”, the numbers that previously showed in the “Seats” and “Rooms” fields will be wiped clean, and the Tour Notes field will reflect “THIS DEPARTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED”.

Closing out the Ops Records

In Ops, there is also a “Cancel” button which, when clicked, will ask a similar question as what is prompted in TM, i.e. do you want to cancel just the record you have open or all records related to the same tour. Regardless of your choice, when you “Cancel” an Ops record, all of the passenger numbers are stripped out so that nothing is impacting the costs and the Balance Due thus shows as zero. The only way you can reflect that you owe that vendor something—if you are being charged a penalty, for example—is by entering the amount in the misc field.

Example
Say you have a Vendor that you owed and paid $1,000 and they are not giving you any refund. On the A/P tab, in the Misc Cost field enter $1,000 and in the adjacent Description field enter “CXL Penalty” (or similar).

For a Vendor that you owed/paid $1,000 that is refunding you $500, do the same thing as far as posting a Misc Cost of $500 and “CXL Penalty” as the description. When the refund check is received, post it as follows: In the Transaction Description field, chose “Refund Rcvd”. The amount goes in as (positive) $500 and the Label should be “CR”. Click on “Post” as always and enter the number of the check you’ve received.

One final adjustment may be to remove any numbers that remain in the “Manual Adj” fields that appear on the Inventory and Account Payable tabs.

After accounting for penalties and posting refunds that you may have received from the Vendor, the record should reflect a zero payable.

In the end, your Ops cost should basically reflect the total of what you paid and didn’t get back, and on the Res side you’ll see what you didn’t refund the group.

When you run the P/L report, the Res Paid field will reflect all payments received.
The Res Due should be empty.
The Rev Adj Est will reflect the amount of your refund to the booking record.
The Tour Gross field should reflect the amount you penalized your client.
The Ops Cost field will reflect the total of all your Vendor penalties.
The Ops Paid field should match the Ops Cost amount.
The Ops Payable field will be empty.
The Est Profit will be the difference between what you kept (the penalty amount) versus what you paid/lost to your Vendors.
The % will, as always, be a reflection of the difference (positive or negative) between your receivables and payables

If you have any questions that are not answered here Contact TourTools Support for assistance.