Free tool
Small group trip break-even calculator
Enter your price, your per traveler land cost and your fixed outlays, and see the seat at which the departure turns profitable and what it pays you per hour.
Free tool, no sign up
Pre-departure admin hours calculator
See how many hours the roster work on one departure takes and what that becomes across a full season of trips.
The hours nobody counts are the small repeated ones. Nine minutes writing a payment reminder, resending the link and checking what actually landed. Twelve minutes chasing an insurance certificate and filing a passport page. Five hours across a season of rooming intake, pairing, re-pairing and the conversations that follow each change. None of it feels like work worth logging, which is exactly why it disappears from your pricing.
This calculator multiplies those small tasks by your roster size, your installment count and the number of departures you run, then converts the total into full working days. Organizers usually run it once, look at the days figure, and either raise their prices or change how the chasing happens.
Your result
Admin hours per departure
13.2
Payment chasing, document collection and rooming for one trip, before any planning work.
Admin hours across the season
52.8
The same work repeated across every departure you run this year.
Full working days per year
6.6
Season admin hours expressed as eight hour days you never invoiced for.
Admin minutes per traveler
66
What each woman on the roster costs you in administrative time.
Compare the per traveler minutes against your margin per traveler from the break-even calculator to see what the roster work is really costing.
Why the chasing is the expensive part
Document collection has an end. Once a woman has sent her passport page and her insurance certificate, the task is done and it never comes back. Payment chasing does not work that way. Every installment date restarts the same cycle across the whole roster, and the four women who always pay late are late again on every single one.
That is why the installment count matters more than most organizers expect. Moving from two payments to four feels generous to travelers and it genuinely helps them budget, but it doubles the reminder work unless the reminders send themselves. Offer the longer schedule, and take the manual chasing out at the same time.
What the number should change
If the season figure lands somewhere between five and ten full working days, that is roughly two weeks of unpaid work sitting inside your calendar. The honest responses are to price it in, to reduce it, or to accept it deliberately rather than by default. Pretending it is not there is what produces a full roster and a thin year.
Reducing it is mostly about the repeated tasks rather than the judgment calls. Rooming decisions need your attention and always will. Reminder emails, document requests and the reconciliation of who has paid what do not, and those three lines usually make up two thirds of the total on the calculator above.
Questions about this calculator
Does this include trip planning and supplier work?
No, deliberately. This counts only the roster administration between the deposit and the departure. Itinerary design, site inspection, supplier negotiation and marketing are separate work, and they belong in the hours field of the break-even calculator instead.
Nine minutes per reminder sounds high for one email.
It is rarely one email. It is checking the account, writing the message, resending the payment link, answering the reply that asks whether she can move the date, and updating your own record. Track it honestly for one installment cycle and most organizers find the figure is close.
How do I use this when I set my prices?
Divide your net profit per traveler by the admin minutes per traveler shown here. That gives you what an hour of roster work earns you. If the answer embarrasses you, either the price is too low or too much of the chasing is still being done by hand.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The departure readiness checklist
Every task a small group departure needs between the day you announce it and the morning everyone meets in the lobby, in the order it has to happen.
Those are your departure's numbers, not a sample
You just put your own roster, your own dates and your own costs through it, which makes the result something you can act on this week. Bring the same figures to a demo and we will set the departure up around them, from the deposit through the rooming intake to the messages that go out in the final six weeks. Twenty minutes, and the numbers are yours either way.