06/01/2026
When a travel supplier fails, the agents who feel it most are not always the ones with the largest bookings, but they are the ones who never thought about their exposure in advance.
The refund process, the client communication, the rebooking effort and the cash flow impact all hit simultaneously. For a small agency without reserves or a protocol for this scenario, the operational disruption can be as damaging as the financial loss itself.
Most travel businesses have no formal credit exposure policy. They book through suppliers they trust, built on relationships over years, with an implicit assumption that a well-known name is a safe one but this is not always.
Understanding your supplier exposure means knowing how much client money sits with any single supplier at any given time, what your obligations are if that supplier fails, and whether your errors and omissions coverage addresses the scenarios that actually matter.
This is not a contingency most agents plan for until they need it. The ones who have thought it through in advance are considerably better positioned when it happens, and the planning itself takes far less time than dealing with the aftermath without it.
