the numbers
What travel advisors actually charge
My average planning fee per client, every year from 2012 to 2025 — including the years it went down.
Almost every conversation about planning fees happens in the abstract. Someone says advisors should charge for their time, everyone agrees, and nobody says a number. The people giving the advice rarely tell you what they charge themselves, which makes the advice impossible to check and impossible to use.
So here are mine. Every year I have been charging, what the average client paid me, and what was going on in the business that year. It is not a survey and it is not an industry benchmark. It is one advisor's record, published because I could not find anyone else's when I needed it.
In 2014 I charged my first planning fee. It was $75, and I picked that number because I half-hoped it would make the client go away.
They said yes. They stayed a client for years. And I spent the next decade working out what the number should have been.
How these figures are calculated
Each year is the total planning fees I charged that year divided by the number of clients I charged. It is an average, not a rate card — individual clients paid more and less than the figure shown. Fees are in US dollars and are separate from commission, which is paid by suppliers and is not included in any number below.
If the distinction between a fee and a commission is new to you, start here instead — the numbers below will make more sense afterwards.
The record
| Year | What was happening | Average |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Started as a travel advisor. Charged nothing for planning. Didn't know it was an option. | $0 |
| 2014 | First planning fee. Quoted it to a Disney family, hoping they'd say no. They said yes, and stayed a client. | $75 |
| 2015 | $121 | |
| 2016 | The first year it really moved. 44 clients charged, up from six. | $129 |
| 2017 | $140 | |
| 2018 | $185 | |
| 2019 | $262 | |
| 2020 | $311 | |
| 2021 | $363 | |
| 2022 | First year the average cleared $500. | $502 |
| 2023 | The high mark. | $597 |
| 2024 | The number went down. It does that. | $465 |
| 2025 | 19 clients, at an average of $524. That's about $10,000 in planning fees for the year, on top of commission. In 2012, that money stayed on the table. | $524 |
Thirteen years, one advisor, United States. Figures are averages per client, in USD.
What moved the number
The first few years were not strategy. I raised the fee in $50 steps, and I picked $50 because it felt like the largest amount I could add without anyone noticing. There was no research behind any of it. At one point I settled on $200 purely because that was the deposit on a Disney package, which turned out to be a mistake — clients kept asking whether they had already paid it.
2016 was the first year the number really moved, and it moved because I finally charged consistently. Forty-four clients paid a fee that year, against six the year before. The average barely changed. The volume changed everything.
2022 was when the average cleared $500, and by then the fee had stopped being an apology. I had stopped setting it against what commission might eventually pay and started setting it against the work the trip actually took. Those are different questions and they produce very different numbers.
2024 went down, to $465. I have left that in because the years that go down are the ones nobody publishes. The likeliest explanation is that I took on more retainer clients, and a retainer is charged once — the repeat work that follows comes back as commission rather than as a new planning fee. A falling average did not mean a falling income.
2025 was 19 clients at an average of $524, which is about $10,000 in planning fees for the year, on top of commission. Fewer clients than the busy years, and more money. That trade is the whole reason I started charging.
What this is not
One advisor is not an industry. These figures come from a single US-based practice, weighted heavily toward Disney and theme-park travel in the early years and much broader later on. The client counts are small — small enough that two unusual trips can move an annual average noticeably.
Treat them as an existence proof rather than a benchmark. They show what one advisor's fees did over thirteen years. They do not show what yours should be.
What the numbers don't tell you
Published figures answer one question and only one: whether this is possible. They do not tell you where to start, what to say when a client asks what you charge, or how to hold a number when someone pushes back on it. Those are the parts that took me a decade, and they are not visible in a table.
If the record above is useful to you, the honest next step is not to copy my numbers. It is to work out what your own time is worth, and then to practice saying that figure out loud until it stops sounding like a question.
The Travel Fee Playbook™
The system behind the numbers above: ten modules, seven resource guides, and the wording for the conversations that come after you name a fee.
See what's inside