Every travel agency has an incentive structure, and it shapes the advice you get. This page describes ours in full before we have earned a dollar of it — where the money will come from, where it will not, how it could bias us, and what you can hold us to.
Three sources and no fourth. Zeptotravel is new and has taken no commission yet, so what follows describes the model we are building on rather than money already banked. We do not sell your personal data, and we do not earn anything from the fact that you called rather than clicked.
A percentage paid by a rental company after the booking is fulfilled. It comes out of the supplier's margin rather than being added to your price. Car rental is the only product we sell that pays it in any meaningful amount, and it is often clawed back if you cancel.
On negotiated air fares, the difference between a contracted net rate and the price we quote. It sits inside the fare rather than beside it, which is why it is not a separate line on your confirmation.
Charged for work suppliers do not pay for — reissues, refund processing, name corrections, complex routing. Published in advance in the service fee schedule and always named as ours.
Most travel companies answer "how do you make money" with a sentence about being free to use. That is technically true and practically useless, because "free to you" usually means "paid by someone whose interests are not identical to yours". This is the long answer, including the awkward parts.
One qualification governs everything below. Zeptotravel is new: no commission has been paid to us, no consolidator margin earned, no service fee charged. What follows is a description of the model — how agency revenue works, what each product typically pays, and which way that pulls — not a report of revenue received. Where a sentence says car rental pays more than published air, it is describing how this industry pays agencies generally, which is checkable against any trade source; it is not a statement about our own books. We are publishing it now, before the first booking, precisely because an incentive structure disclosed in advance is worth something and one disclosed after the fact is worth very little.
Commission is a percentage of the booking value paid to us by the supplier after the travel is fulfilled. It comes out of the supplier's own margin — it is not a surcharge on your price, and the same car booked direct at the same rate does not get cheaper because no agency is involved. What matters is that the rate is wildly uneven across the two things we sell, and the unevenness runs in one direction.
Car rental pays the most, and it is now the only product on the desk that pays commission at all. Vehicle rental is an inventory-rich, perishable product where suppliers compete hard for distribution, and commission in the high single digits to mid teens as a percentage is the normal shape of that market. Rates vary by supplier, rate type and volume, and prepaid rates frequently pay differently from pay-at-counter ones.
Published air fares typically pay little or nothing. US carriers largely removed base commission on domestic published fares decades ago. Some international carriers and markets still pay a percentage, but as a working assumption a standard published economy ticket sold at the airline's own fare generates close to zero commission for the agency selling it. This matters more than anything else on this page, and the bias section explains why.
So the gap is not marginal. On the same trip, a week's car hire can earn us more than the long-haul tickets that took four times the work to price, issue and service. That asymmetry is the single most important thing to understand about how any travel agency — this one included — is paid, because it is what shapes the suggestion you get when an advisor says "while I have you, shall I look at the car?"
It is worth being blunt about what a two-product catalogue does to that picture. An agency selling accommodation, rail and activities alongside air and ground draws commission from several directions, and no single product carries the weight. We sell two things, only one of which pays commission at all, so the entire counterweight to a labour-intensive, low-paying air business is the car. We are not going to pretend that makes us more neutral. It makes the incentive narrower and sharper, and it means the specific upsells worth watching for are few enough to name: a longer hire than the trip needs, a vehicle class above what the party and the bags require, and a prepaid rate chosen over pay-at-counter. Ask about any of the three and you will get the reasoning, not a deflection.
Commission is also contingent. Cancel a rental and it is normally reversed; no-show and it is reversed; if a supplier fails to pay, we absorb it. That means our interest is aligned with the trip actually happening as planned, which is at least a useful alignment.
The second source applies only to air, and only to fares that are not the airline's published fare. A consolidator holds a contract with a carrier permitting it to sell certain routes, cabins and departure windows at a net rate below the public price, usually in exchange for volume and usually with conditions: restricted routings, limited or no changes, no online display, sometimes no mileage accrual. It sells at that net rate to an accredited agency, and the agency's revenue is the difference between the net rate and the price it quotes you.
Two consequences follow. The margin sits inside the fare, not beside it — there is no separate line on your confirmation to point at, which is a structural feature of the product rather than something hidden. And a negotiated fare can be simultaneously cheaper for you and more profitable for us than a published one: the single place where the incentive and your interest point the same way, and the reason phone-only fares exist at all.
The trade-off is in the rules. Negotiated fares often carry harsher change and refund conditions than the published fare for the same seat. An advisor should tell you which kind you are being quoted, and what it costs to change it, before you pay.
The third source is the only one you pay directly. Where a service fee applies it is stated verbally before you authorise payment and itemised on your confirmation, always identified as a Zeptotravel fee rather than a supplier charge. Post-ticketing work — voluntary changes, name corrections, refund processing, seat and baggage add-ons, complex reissues — carries the published rates in our post-ticketing service fee schedule.
Fees exist because labour and commission are inversely related. The product that takes the most work to sell and service correctly — the published air ticket — pays the least. A refund on a cancelled international itinerary can involve a waiver request, a supplier escalation, a reissue and weeks of follow-up. Without a fee, that work would be subsidised by pushing the products that do pay, which is precisely the bias this page is about. A published, named fee is the less distorting option.
Supplier penalties are not our fees. A carrier change penalty, a rental no-show charge or a late-return fee belongs to the supplier and is passed through unchanged. You should always be told which is which.
Quoting, comparing and explaining are free. There is no charge to ask us to price an itinerary, read you a fare rule, check a baggage allowance, explain whether a rental waiver duplicates your card's coverage, or tell you your options during a disruption on a booking you did not make with us. We earn nothing on a 24-hour risk-free cancellation, nothing on a call that ends with us telling you a public fare is cheaper, and nothing on the schedule-change monitoring and rebooking that follows an involuntary change.
We also do not sell personal data, earn from advertising on this site, or take payment from suppliers to appear in the editorial guidance across these pages. Where a commercial arrangement affects placement or ranking, it is labelled where it appears — that rule is part of our editorial standards.
Set the three sources side by side and the risk is obvious. Air pays least and takes the most work; ground pays most. The structurally profitable advice is therefore: extend the rental by a day, take the bigger vehicle class, book prepaid rather than pay-at-counter. Some of that is genuinely right for some travellers. All of it happens to pay us more. And with two products rather than a catalogue, that pull is not diluted — it points at one line of one booking, which makes the controls below matter more, not less.
We will not resolve that by describing our internal compensation arrangements, because you have no way to audit a claim like that and it would be worth as much as any other unverifiable assertion. What we can offer instead are controls you can observe on the call and check on your confirmation:
Take these anywhere, not just here. An agency that answers all five comfortably is being straight with you; one that deflects is telling you something too.
The people behind this desk are on about Zeptotravel; how the guidance here is written, reviewed and corrected is on editorial standards.
Two products, three revenue shapes, and one clear ranking: published air pays an agency least, negotiated air sits in the middle, car rental pays most. Commission structures vary by supplier, rate type and contract, and we have not yet contracted or been paid under any of them, so the middle column describes the typical shape of the market rather than a rate we receive. Use the last column on your next call — here or anywhere else.
| Vertical | How we are typically paid | What that means for you | What to ask us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flights — published fares | Little or no commission on most US published fares; a service fee where one applies | We have no financial reason to prefer one carrier's published fare over another, and no reason to inflate the itinerary | "Is there a service fee on this, and what does it cover?" |
| Flights — negotiated fares | Consolidator margin inside the fare | Often cheaper than the published fare for the same cabin, but usually with tighter change and refund rules | "What does it cost to change or refund this, compared with the published fare?" |
| Car rental | Percentage commission from the rental supplier — materially more than air pays, reversed on cancellation, and the only commission-bearing product we sell; typically nothing on counter add-ons | The strongest attachment incentive we have: toward a longer hire, a higher vehicle class and a prepaid rate. We do not earn on the counter insurance you may be sold at pick-up, which is why we will tell you when your own card cover already duplicates it | "Does this class genuinely fit our bags and passengers, and would you still take the extra day if the trip were yours?" |
Commission percentages are not published here because they vary by supplier and contract and any single figure would be misleading. Ask on the call about the specific booking and you will be told.
Answered against the rules that actually govern the booking — the carrier's filed fare, the rental agreement, the regulation — rather than from general advice.
Usually not, and sometimes materially less — negotiated and consolidator fares are frequently below the published fare for the same cabin on the same aircraft. But "usually" is not "always". On a simple domestic route with a promotional published fare, a public online price can be the cheapest thing available, and where a service fee applies it can tip the comparison. Our advisors are expected to tell you when that is the case rather than talk you past it. The fee schedule is published at post-ticketing service fees.
It is the obvious risk, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest: car rental typically pays a percentage commission, while published air fares typically pay very little or nothing. Because car rental is the only commission-bearing product we sell, that incentive is concentrated in one place rather than spread across a catalogue — extend the rental, upgrade the vehicle class, take the prepaid rate. The controls we commit to are that the total is quoted before work begins, that every fee is named as ours or the supplier's, that we will tell you when a cheaper public option exists, and that you can ask on any call how we are paid on the specific booking and get a straight answer.
A consolidator holds a contract with an airline that allows it to sell certain routes and cabins below the published fare, usually with conditions attached — restricted routings, limited changes, sometimes no online display. The consolidator buys at a net rate and the selling agency earns the difference between that net rate and the price you are quoted. That margin is inside the fare rather than added to it, which is why it does not appear as a separate line. If you want to know whether a quote is a published or a negotiated fare, ask; the answer changes what the change and refund rules will be.
Because the work and the commission do not line up. Published air tickets — the most labour-intensive product we sell, with the most complex rules and the most post-booking servicing — are also the product that pays the least. Service fees cover the work that no supplier pays for: reissues, refund processing, name corrections, waiver pursuit and complex routing. They are published in advance in our service fee schedule, stated before you authorise payment and itemised on your confirmation, and they are separate from any supplier penalty.
Generally no, and the usual outcome is that an agency loses what it had earned. Commission on a cancelled rental is normally clawed back by the supplier. Air commission, where any exists, is recovered on a refund. Our own service fees for work already performed may be retained where our published schedule says so, and that position is stated before payment, not discovered afterwards. The cancellation framework is in our refund and cancellation policy.
Where any commercial arrangement affects what is shown or the order it appears in, we will label it on the page it appears on. Editorial guidance — the rule explainers, comparison tables and advice throughout this site — is not sold, and a supplier cannot buy a recommendation in it. That separation is set out in our editorial standards, which also names the people who write and review the content and how to report an error in it.
It is a fair question and it gets a straight answer. Quotes, comparisons and fare-rule explanations carry no charge.
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