Guide: how to run a travel agency in Romania

Organiser or intermediary: which type of agency you are

The first decision is not about software, it is about licensing. An organiser agency builds the package: it combines accommodation, transport, transfers and excursions and sells it in its own name, taking responsibility for delivering it. An intermediary sells someone else's package and earns a commission.

The distinction propagates through everything else — the documents you issue, who answers to the traveller when a supplier fails, and above all how you compute VAT. An agency that behaves as an organiser but accounts as an intermediary misreports its margin.

What you legally need in order to sell packages

• A tourism licence, of the right activity type (organiser or intermediary), for each unit where you sell.
• A tourism manager certificate for whoever runs day-to-day operations — or studies/a management course in tourism recognised as equivalent.
• An insolvency guarantee ensuring travellers' payments can be refunded: a bank guarantee letter, an insurance policy, a guarantee fund or another lawfully constituted instrument. The obligation sits with the ORGANISER — an intermediary reselling a Romanian organiser's package is covered by that organiser's guarantee.
• Pre-contractual information and the package sale contract in the form required by GO 2/2018 — including what happens on price changes or cancellation.

The booking flow, step by step

Agencies that work in an orderly way follow the same path for every file, whether it is a two-night city break or a ten-day tour. In the platform, the request, the components with their costs, the quote, the confirmation and the payments live on the booking file; the traveller contract remains the agency's own document.

1. Record the requestNote the dates, number of travellers, budget and preferences. From this point the request has an owner instead of living in a chat.
2. Build the packageAdd accommodation, transport, transfers and excursions, each with its supplier and cost, so you see the total cost before quoting a price.
3. Apply the margin and send the quoteThe selling price is computed from costs, not from memory, and the quote goes out in a form the client can accept.
4. Confirm with suppliersLock the allocations and record every confirmation on the file, so anyone on the team can see what the supplier answered without phoning around.
5. Sign the contract and issue documentsContract, day-by-day itinerary, accommodation and transfer vouchers, tickets. The traveller leaves with a complete file, not a long email.
6. Close the file on real figuresTrack payments, deposits and supplier deadlines, then compute margin and commission from the file's figures, not estimates.

The money: margin, margin-scheme VAT and commissions

The special regime for travel agencies (art. 311 of the Tax Code) applies when the agency acts in its own name towards the traveller and uses services bought from other suppliers. All operations for that trip count as a single service, and the taxable base is the profit margin — the difference between the total paid by the traveller and the agency's costs for services provided for the traveller's direct benefit.

Two practical consequences are often forgotten: the agency does not deduct the VAT invoiced by suppliers for services provided for the traveller's direct benefit, and does not show the tax separately on the traveller's invoice. Hence the requirement for additional records — the margin is justified per package, not globally at month end.

• Keep costs on the file, not on the supplier: the margin is per package, so a cost not attributed to a file drops out of the calculation.
• Separate special-regime operations from normal-regime ones — if you also sell services outside the special regime, records must be kept separately.
• Compute the agent's commission from the file's margin, not from the amount collected: otherwise you pay commission on money that covers the supplier's cost.

The mistakes that cost most

• Prices computed in spreadsheets with formulas copied season to season: an old cost slips through and the margin exists on paper but not in the bank.
• Bookings confirmed verbally and never recorded — the classic source of double bookings and forgotten confirmations.
• Travel documents written by hand for each traveller: they eat the agent's hours exactly at peak season, when those hours cost most.
• Margin tracked only at season's end: by the time you learn a destination ran at a loss, you have already sold it dozens of times.

How 4AgencyTravel helps

4AgencyTravel keeps exactly the structure described above: one file per booking, with its components, suppliers and costs, showing cost and selling price on every line, the margin and the balance still to collect. It does not replace your accountant and does not obtain your licence — but it makes the figures you pass on come from the same data you work with daily.

• Package templates built from components, with supplier, cost and price on every line, a default markup to start from and departures with their own capacity; clone a package when you want to reuse it.
• Day-by-day itineraries tied to a booking or a package, and vouchers on the booking (confirmation, accommodation, transport, travel documents), each with its own code.
• Suppliers, contracts, allocations and commissions in one place, tied to the files that use them.
• Sales reports by destination or month, margins over a date range, commissions and occupancy per departure — on the files' real data.