The essentials
- There is no single right path: the one that suits you depends on how much you can invest, how much time you have and whether you need to be invoicing right away.
- In Spain, travel agencies are regulated region by region: the specific requirements come from your autonomous region, not from an article on the internet.
- The price of the trip is not your money. Your income is the margin — and in Spain, travel agency VAT is calculated on that margin.
- Your first clients come from the people you already know, from a clear niche and from word of mouth. Google comes later.
- Start with the bare minimum. Almost every tool can wait until there are clients to justify it.
One warning before you carry on: you will not find specific amounts, deadlines or requirements here. It is not laziness. Tourism regulation in Spain is devolved to the autonomous regions and changes over time, so any figure you read on this page would stand a very good chance of being wrong for your particular case. What you will find is which decisions lie ahead of you, what paperwork exists and who to ask about each part of it.
A shop, online or from home: the first decision
This is not a matter of taste. It defines your fixed costs, the way you win clients and how fast you can afford to get things wrong without going under. All three models work; what changes is the game you are playing.
An agency with a high street shop
The classic model: an office open to the public on a street with footfall.
Pros
- The shopfront wins clients on its own: people walk past, ask and buy without you having done any marketing.
- Instant trust. Some clients, with big budgets or complex trips, need a door they can come back to if something goes wrong.
- It positions you in your neighbourhood or your town — territory the big online agencies never set foot in.
Cons
- You pay rent, utilities and the fit-out from month zero, before you have sold a single trip.
- It ties you to opening hours and to a chair: while you are minding the counter, you are not out selling.
- Your market is geographical. You grow if your street grows.
- It adds paperwork specific to the premises (municipal opening licence, accessibility) that the online version does not have.
An online travel agency
No office open to the public: you find, advise and sell to clients over the internet, by phone and by video call.
Pros
- No premises to pay for: almost all the investment goes into product, brand and winning clients.
- Your market is not your street. You can specialise in a very specific niche and go looking for it across the whole country, or several.
- Growing does not force you to double your structure.
Cons
- Trust has to be manufactured: with no face and no door, the client needs more proof before paying you up front.
- Driving traffic is a trade in itself. If you neither master it nor pay for it, your website is a brochure nobody sees.
- You compete on ground where the big platforms have been investing for years. Winning on price is not an option; winning on judgement and service is.
A travel agency from home
The same business, with your home as the registered address of the activity and no walk-in service.
Pros
- It is the cheapest start there is: you can begin without leaving your current job just yet.
- You set your own hours and your own pace while you properly learn the trade.
- It lowers the risk: if it has not worked after a year, you are not left carrying a lease.
Cons
- You are on your own. No colleagues to settle a product question and nobody to make you sit down and work.
- Separating life and work is hard: clients write at eleven at night and you are sitting in the living room.
- You have to make up for the lack of an office with a digital presence, a method and a lot of quick replies.
Running the agency from your home does not make it an informal business. The administrative requirements, the insolvency guarantee and your obligations towards the traveller are the same as with a shop: what changes is the address of the activity, not the responsibility.
There is a pattern that repeats itself: start from home or online, prove that you know how to sell and who to sell to, and open a shop (if you need one at all) once there is a client base to support it. The other way round — premises first, clients later — you carry the fixed cost in precisely the months when you sell least.
Sole trader or company: the legal form you register under
A great deal of time gets lost here. The legal form matters, but less than it seems at the start, and it can be changed later on. Do not put the project on hold for six months over this decision.
Registering as a sole trader (autónomo)
You operate as a natural person: you are the business.
Pros
- Quick, cheap registration: you can be up and running in no time.
- Lighter accounting and reporting obligations.
- Lower fixed costs while you are invoicing little, which is exactly when that matters most.
- It fits well if you are going to combine it with another job at first.
Cons
- You are liable for the debts of the business with your personal assets.
- Above a certain level of profit, the tax treatment stops being the most efficient option.
- Some suppliers and corporate clients prefer to deal with a company.
Setting up a company
You create a legal person (usually a sociedad limitada, the Spanish equivalent of a limited company) that owns the business.
Pros
- It separates the company assets from your own.
- It projects a more solid image to suppliers, banks and corporate clients.
- It makes it easier to bring in partners and split shareholdings from the outset, instead of improvising it later.
Cons
- Incorporating costs money and time before you have sold anything.
- Heavier accounting and reporting obligations, every year, whether there is any activity or not.
- Moving money from the company into your own pocket has its own rules and its own cost.
Watch out for one thing that is specific to this industry: in some autonomous regions, the insolvency guarantee and certain requirements may be framed differently depending on the legal form you operate under. Confirm it with your adviser and with your region’s tourism authority before you decide, not afterwards.
The honest answer: if you are starting on your own, from home, and you still do not know how much you are going to invoice, it makes sense to consider the simplest route and make the jump when the numbers call for it. But have that conversation with an adviser who can look at your case, not with a guide.
Under another agency’s umbrella, as a franchise or on your own
There is a route many people discover late: you do not need to set up your own agency to start selling trips. You can do it leaning on one that already exists, and that decision completely changes the time and the money you need to get going.
As an associate agent with an established agency
The host agency provides the licence, the guarantee, the insurance and access to suppliers. You win the client, design and manage the trip, and take a share of what is invoiced for it.
Pros
- You start selling in weeks, not months.
- None of the investment or the paperwork of setting up your own agency.
- From day one you have access to supplier agreements that would take you years to secure on your own.
- You learn the trade with a safety net, which is what you miss most in the first year.
Cons
- You give up part of the margin on every sale.
- The contract with the traveller belongs to the host agency, not to you.
- You play with their suppliers, their terms and their response times.
- There is one point to read very carefully: what happens to your client base the day you leave.
Opening as a franchise
You open under a well-known brand, with its training, its buying power and its systems, in exchange for a fee and a set of conditions.
Pros
- The brand already carries trust: you do not start from scratch explaining who you are.
- Processes, training and systems sorted from day one.
- Buying agreements you would never reach on your own.
Cons
- You pay for it, and you pay in the bad months too.
- Less freedom to choose product, prices and image.
- The contract rules: obligations, territorial exclusivity and, above all, what happens when you leave.
On your own, with your own agency
You are the licensed agency: the registration, the guarantee, the suppliers and the brand are yours.
Pros
- The whole margin is yours.
- You decide on product, suppliers, prices and brand without asking anyone.
- You are building an asset that belongs to you: the client base and the brand.
Cons
- All the paperwork and all the responsibility are yours too.
- You start from zero on trust and on supplier terms.
- It is the slowest route to the first sale, at exactly the moment you have the least financial staying power.
Plenty of agencies that stand on their own today started under someone else’s umbrella and went independent once they had a client base of their own. That is not giving up: it is reducing the risk in the year when you have the least room for error. If you choose this route, negotiate three things in writing: the split, who is named as the controller of your clients’ data, and what happens to those clients if the relationship ends.
The paperwork for opening a travel agency in Spain: what exists and who to ask
This is where the internet is full of articles handing you exact figures. Be sceptical. In Spain, tourism regulation is devolved to the autonomous regions: there is no single national requirement for opening a travel agency. What you are asked for, what the procedure is called and what documentation it involves depend on where the business is based and on the rules in force at that moment.
What can be said with certainty is which blocks of paperwork exist, so that you turn up at the counter knowing exactly what to ask.
Registering as a business
Registration with the Spanish tax office under the right business activity code and registration in the self-employed scheme, or incorporating the company if you go down that route. This is the block common to any business; there is nothing tourism-specific about it.
Who to ask: A gestor or tax adviser. It is the first hour of meeting that is worth paying for.
Registration or declaration with your region’s tourism registry
This one really is the procedure specific to the sector. In quite a few regions it no longer works as a prior licence but as a declaración responsable, a responsible declaration — but the name, the procedure, the documentation and the conditions change from one region to another. Do not take at face value what someone you know went through in another region.
Who to ask: The tourism department (consejería or dirección general de turismo) of your autonomous region. It is the authoritative source, and asking costs nothing.
Insolvency protection guarantee
European package travel rules require anyone who organises or sells package holidays to hold a guarantee covering the refund of payments made by travellers and their repatriation if the agency cannot meet its obligations. How it is arranged (insurance, bank guarantee, sector fund) and what cover is required is set by each region.
Who to ask: Your autonomous region sets the what; a specialist insurance broker or your bank, the how.
Public liability insurance
It covers damage you may cause in the course of your business. It is standard in the sector and in some regions it is expressly required, on top of the insolvency guarantee, which is an entirely different thing.
Who to ask: An insurance broker who works with travel agencies. A generic retail policy does not cover the same things.
The contract and the information given to the traveller
Selling a package holiday obliges you to hand over pre-contractual information and a contract with prescribed content. This is not optional paperwork: it is probably the legal obligation most often breached out of sheer ignorance. You can generate yours with your agency’s details in the free package travel contract generator.
Who to ask: Package travel legislation and, for specific questions, a lawyer. For the document itself, the free generator linked above.
Data protection (GDPR)
You are going to handle names, phone numbers, passport copies and, sometimes, health data (allergies, reduced mobility). You need to inform the client, have a lawful basis for processing that data and store it properly. The sooner you set it up correctly, the less it will cost you to put right.
Who to ask: The Spanish Data Protection Agency publishes free guides for small businesses and the self-employed.
If you open premises: the municipal paperwork
An opening licence or responsible declaration, building work if there is any, accessibility and mandatory signage. This block disappears entirely if you start from home or online, and it is one of the reasons that start is faster.
Who to ask: The town hall of the municipality where the premises are.
Where to look for the real sources
- The tourism authority of your autonomous region. Above any other source, this page included.
- The consolidated text of the Spanish General Law for the Protection of Consumers and Users (Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007), where the Spanish package travel rules live: consolidated text on the BOE.
- Directive (EU) 2015/2302 on package travel, from which the above derives: text on EUR-Lex.
- The Spanish Data Protection Agency for the GDPR side of things.
And if you are in Latin America? The scheme is more similar than you might think: in most countries there is a national registry of tourism service providers run by the tourism authority, on top of the tax registration and the corresponding insurance. The name of the registry and the requirements change from country to country, so the rule is exactly the same: the source is your country’s tourism authority, not an article on the internet.
How a travel agency makes money
First of all, the sentence worth committing to memory: the price of the trip is not your money. Most of it is supplier cost that merely passes through your account. What you earn is the margin. An agency can invoice a great deal and earn very little, and it happens more often than anyone admits.
Supplier commission
Wholesalers, tour operators, ground handlers, hotels, cruise lines and insurers pay you a percentage of what you sell. It is the basis of the classic model. That percentage depends on the supplier, on the product and on the volume you send them: there is no standard industry figure, and anyone who quotes you one off the top of their head is making it up. Ask supplier by supplier.
Service fees: charging for your work
Fees you charge the client for designing the itinerary, managing the booking and supporting them during the trip. This is what separates the agency that gives its hours away from the one that charges for its judgement. Many charge it up front as a design retainer and deduct it if the client books: it filters out time-wasters and pays for your time even when the sale does not close.
Tailor-made trips you build yourself
You buy individual services (flights, accommodation, transfers, guides, tickets) and sell a product that exists on no search engine, with your own margin. More work and more margin — and more responsibility too: if you are the one organising the package, you are the one answering to the traveller for everything going to plan.
Groups and your own departures
Weddings, social clubs, school trips, corporate groups, themed departures. One sales effort and many seats: it is usually the step change for a small agency. It is also where the admin spirals out of control fastest if you do not keep payments, rooming lists and documentation up to date.
Ancillary services
Travel insurance, visa and documentation handling, transfers, experiences, upgrades. They add margin on a client who has already said yes, which is the cheapest margin there is to win.
Repeat business
The client who comes back and the one who recommends you cost nothing to acquire. In a business where acquisition is the most expensive part, a well-tended client base is a revenue stream, not a list of dead contacts.
A Spanish detail that catches almost everyone out in their first quarter: travel agencies are taxed under a special VAT scheme in which the tax is calculated on the margin and not on the total price of the trip. It changes the sums considerably. Confirm it with your adviser before you set your prices.
Now your numbers, not ours
You will not see a single revenue figure in this guide, because any industry average applied to your case would be false. What you can do is put your own numbers into two free tools and see what comes out:
- Income calculator for independent travel agents: how much you need to sell, and at what margin, to reach what you want to earn each month.
- Margin calculator per trip: what you really keep from each trip after VAT on the margin and the cost of the payment gateway.
Your first clients: where they really come from
Not one of them will come from Google in the first month. Search rankings take time, and paid advertising when you still do not know what you are selling or to whom is the fastest way to burn the little money you have. The first clients come from far less glamorous places.
Your address book
Family, friends, former colleagues, the gym crowd, the parents at school. It is not about selling to your friends: it is about someone giving you the first chance and letting you show what you can do. A first trip done well tells the story on its own.
Pick a niche and say it out loud
“Tailor-made trips” means nothing to anyone. “Honeymoons in South-East Asia”, “safaris with young children”, “the Camino de Santiago for corporate groups” or “diving” do. When you are the specialist in something, a recommendation has a specific sentence to repeat, and you have somewhere to go looking for those people.
Word of mouth, on purpose
Word of mouth is not luck: you create it. By asking for it explicitly when the client comes back delighted, by looking after the post-trip follow-up and by making it easy: a message they can forward as it is, a review in two clicks.
Go where your niche already is
Parents’ groups, sports clubs, cultural associations, the businesses on the industrial estate, wedding planners if you are going for honeymoons. Communities where your ideal client already gathers, with or without a screen in between.
Referrers
People who already have your client’s trust and do not compete with you: wedding photographers, personal trainers, language teachers, specialist shops. A simple arrangement with two of them is worth more than a thousand ad impressions.
Social media, but not as a shop window for deals
Posting deals puts you on a level with a search engine, and there you lose. Posting judgement sets you apart: the itinerary you have built and why, the mistake you help people avoid, the hotel you would not recommend. That is what generates direct messages, and direct messages are where quotes come from.
Your local presence and your website, as a medium-term asset
A business listing, real reviews from the clients you have already travelled, a website that explains who you are and what you do. It will not bring you next week’s client, but it is what stops you depending on your address book a year from now.
The uncomfortable part: for the first few months you will spend more time winning clients than designing trips. Anyone who starts an agency because they love travelling, and then discovers the real job is selling, has a hard time. Anyone who knows it in advance organises for it.
And a piece of advice you will thank yourself for two years in: from day one, keep a record of who has enquired, what they asked for and why they did not book. Every quote that does not close today is a client two years from now, as long as you know who they were. WhatsApp will not remember for you.
Which tools to start with (and which ones can wait)
The temptation to assemble an arsenal of software before you have any clients is real, and it is expensive. Here is the minimum you genuinely need and what can comfortably wait.
From day one
- An email address on your own domain. When you are asking for several thousand euros up front, a generic account costs you more than you think.
- A page, even a single one, that says who you are, what you do and how to get in touch. With your face on it.
- Somewhere for enquiries and clients to live. At first it can be a spreadsheet; what it cannot be is “it’s in my WhatsApp”.
- A proper way to take payment and issue invoices, with the tax side sorted before the first sale.
- Your contract and your pre-contractual information ready before you sell, not afterwards.
- Clear numbers: knowing what you keep from each trip before you accept it.
Can wait
- A booking engine, XML connections or your own GDS. Not before you are selling at volume.
- Your own app. It has never been anybody’s problem when they were starting out.
- Paid advertising campaigns with a serious budget. First work out what you sell and to whom.
- The perfect rebrand: expensive logo, stationery, photo shoot. It turns out better once you know what you are.
- A full CRM. Yes, we are the ones saying it.
So when do you really need a CRM?
With five enquiries a month, a CRM solves nothing for you: a notebook solves it. The problem turns up later, and always in the same way: you have forty conversations open, you lose a quote because you did not follow up in time, you cannot find the passport a client sent you in March, and you do not know how much you really earned last quarter.
That is where Manglar comes in: the CRM for travel agencies where the clients, the digital proposals, the signed contracts, the bookings, the payments and the real margin on every file all live. If you are setting up your agency right now, keep it for when the problem exists. We would rather tell you that than sell you a subscription you do not need yet.
Where to start this week
If you have made it this far, more theory is the last thing you need. These are the six things you can do in the next few days that genuinely move the project forward.
- 1Write to or call the tourism department of your autonomous region and ask exactly what you need for the model you want to set up. Note down who you speak to.
- 2Sit down for an hour with a tax adviser to decide on the legal form and register. It is money well spent.
- 3Define your niche in one sentence a stranger understands first time. If it will not come out, you do not have it yet.
- 4Run your numbers in the calculator before you commit to any fixed cost. A lease cannot be undone.
- 5Talk to two or three agencies that work with associate agents, even if you are not going to do it. You will find out how the industry works from the inside.
- 6Write to five people in your address book who are going to travel this year. The first sale is usually closer than it looks.
Frequently asked questions about starting a travel agency
Can you run a travel agency from home?
Yes, and it is the most common way to start today. Working from home changes the address of the activity and your fixed costs, but it does not exempt you from the administrative requirements or from your obligations towards the traveller: they are the same as with a shop. Check with the tourism authority of your autonomous region exactly what it requires for the address you intend to operate from.
Do you need a qualification or specific training to open a travel agency in Spain?
It depends on the autonomous region and on the rules in force, and it is a matter that has changed over the years. It is one of those questions whose only reliable answer comes from the tourism department of your region. What is true everywhere: without knowing the product, the suppliers and package travel law, the business does not stand up, qualification or no qualification.
How much does it cost to start a travel agency?
There is no single figure, and you should be wary of anyone who gives you one without knowing your case. Between starting from home as an associate agent and opening premises on a shopping street there is an enormous difference. What is useful is to draw up your own list of the cost blocks that do exist (registration and advisers, guarantee and insurance, premises if there are any, tools, brand and client acquisition) and to get real quotes in your own city.
Can I sell trips without having my own agency?
Yes: by working as an associate agent with an already established agency, which provides the registration, the guarantee and the supplier agreements while you win the client and manage the trip. You give up part of the margin in exchange for starting much sooner and with less risk. Before signing, put the split in writing, along with what happens to your clients if the relationship ends.
Is an online or a bricks-and-mortar travel agency better?
Neither is better in the abstract. Online is cheaper to launch and does not limit you geographically, but it demands that you know how to win clients on the internet, which is a trade in itself. A shop wins clients on its own through the window and builds trust, but it costs money every month whether you sell or not. With little capital and no client base, starting online or from home gives you more attempts before you run out of room.
How much do you earn with a travel agency?
It depends on how much you sell, at what margin and how many fixed costs you carry, which is why you will not find an industry average here: applied to your case it would be false. What you can do is work it out with your own figures in the income calculator for independent agents and in the margin calculator per trip.
Keep going from here
Everything that follows is free and needs no sign-up. It is designed for exactly the stage you are at.
Income calculator for independent agents
Put in your own numbers: how much you have to sell, and at what margin, to reach what you want to earn.
OpenMargin calculator per trip
What you really keep from each trip, with VAT on the margin and the gateway fee already deducted.
OpenPackage travel contract generator
The contract you are required to hand over on every sale, generated with your agency details.
OpenThe CRM for travel agencies
For when there are more open conversations than fit in your head. Take a look before you need it.
OpenOnce your agency exists, this will be waiting for you.
Manglar is the management software for small travel agencies: clients, quotes, digital proposals, signed contracts, bookings, payments and margins in a single place. You do not have to subscribe today. But when you start losing quotes because you cannot keep up with everything, you will know where to look.
Who publishes this and why there are no figures
This guide is published by the team at Manglar CRM, the management software for travel agencies. We have deliberately avoided specific amounts, deadlines and requirements: travel agencies are a regional matter in Spain and a national one in each Latin American country, the rules change over time, and a wrong figure here could cost you a business decision. For anything specific, the source is always your own tourism authority.
If you spot something that has gone out of date, or that works differently in your region, write to us from the contact page and we will correct it. It is much appreciated.