Hotels, airport transfers, attraction tickets and tours across Asia and the Middle East, bought at trade prices and resold at your own margin. Free to join, top-ups in pounds, and a plain explanation of what UK package law expects from you once you start combining them.
Quick answer: DMC Quote is a Singapore-based B2B travel portal that UK travel agents and homeworkers use to book hotels, airport transfers, attraction tickets and tours in Asia and the Middle East at net rates. Registration is free, you can top up in GBP by bank transfer, and we don't sell flights. If you combine our services into a trip sold in your own name, UK package rules usually make you the organiser, so read the compliance sections before your first booking.
Most UK agents who register with us already sell long-haul. A client wants a fortnight in Thailand, or a Sri Lanka loop that finishes with four nights in the Maldives, or Tokyo and Kyoto with a stopover in Singapore on the way home. The flights are usually the easy bit. What eats the afternoon is the ground: a hotel rate that leaves room for a margin, a transfer that will actually be waiting at 2am in Male, tickets that won't bounce at the gate.
That is the job a B2B travel portal does. Below: how ours works from the UK, how you pay from a sterling account, and the part most portal pages leave out, which is the Package Travel Regulations, ATOL and VAT under TOMS.
None of it is legal or tax advice. It is the reading we would want a new UK account to have done first.
A B2B travel portal is a trade-only booking system. You log in, search live inventory and see net rates, which are the prices we charge you. What you charge your client is your decision. There's no commission to chase and no claim form, because the margin is already yours when the client pays you.
DMC Quote has been running from Singapore since 2012. The figures we publish are 10,000+ registered travel agencies, 1.5M+ hotels in 190+ countries, 10,000+ tours and activities, airport transfers at 15+ airports and 50,000+ bookings. For a UK agent the useful part is the depth in Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Gulf, because that is where our contracting and our support team sit.
What we do not do matters as much as what we do, so here it is up front:
If you're based in the United States or Canada, our US and Canada page covers billing and support for you. The rest of this page is written for Britain.
UK residents made 99.9 million visits abroad in 2025, according to the ONS Travel trends release published this month (the ONS still labels these figures as statistics in development). Spain, France and Italy lead that list by a distance. Asia is a smaller slice, and that is exactly why it rewards a specialist: clients booking Vietnam or the Maldives are far more likely to want someone to build the trip for them.
The UK accounts we open tend to look like one of these.
You might trade under a homeworking network or a host agency, or on your own as a limited company. Either way, the portal gives you a second source of Asia ground product at trade prices. Check one thing before you register: some networks require you to book through approved suppliers, or to put every package through their own protection arrangements. Read your agreement. We'd much rather you asked them first than found out after a client had paid.
An agency with three consultants usually wants three logins. The portal supports sub-users, and you decide which modules each one can open: hotels, transfers, tours, packages, bookings or the wallet. A new consultant can price and quote without being able to spend the wallet balance. A sensible default for anyone in their first few months.
If you sell tailor-made itineraries under your own brand, you already know you are an organiser and will have your protection in place. For you the portal is a buying tool. Hotel and transfer rates are live, and the AI package builder pulls hotel, transfer and tour inventory into a costed itinerary that you mark up and send to the client as a quotation.
Net rate means the price on screen is your cost. On packages built in the portal you can set a markup percentage and send the quotation from inside the system. On single hotel, transfer and ticket bookings you add your margin on your own invoice to the client.
One file, worked through. The figures are illustrative rather than a live quote, and they assume you've topped up in sterling.
| Seven nights in Phuket, two adults | Net cost to you | Your price to the client |
|---|---|---|
| Deluxe room, breakfast included, 7 nights | £840 | Sold as one package |
| Private return airport transfer | £46 | |
| Phi Phi islands day tour, 2 people | £118 | |
| Old town and Big Buddha half-day tour, 2 people | £64 | |
| Total | £1,068 | £1,320 |
| Gross margin | £252, which is 19.1% of the selling price | |
Two things that table leaves out. Card fees, if your client pays by card. And VAT: sold in your own name, that £252 is a margin under the Tour Operators' Margin Scheme, and because the trip is enjoyed outside the UK the margin is zero-rated. The TOMS section explains where that comes from.
It is also a package. A hotel plus a transfer is two different types of travel service, so you'd be the organiser. That is not a reason to avoid selling it, only a reason to have the protection sorted first.
In our view the gap between trade and retail is widest away from the big international chains: island resorts, secondary cities, and the transfer and ticket layer, where there's often no published trade rate to compare against. If you only ever book a Hilton in central Bangkok, your consortium rate may be just as good. Compare a few files before deciding.
Hotel search pulls rates from several sources at once and shows each hotel once, with its rates listed cheapest first. You won't see supplier names. What you do see is the room, the board basis, the price and the rules attached to that price. The same room can appear twice at different prices because two sources sell it on different terms, so read the terms as well as the number.
Four things to check on every rate:
Unpaid bookings do not sit there forever. You can hold a refundable booking and pay before its deadline, and if it isn't paid the system releases it automatically ahead of that deadline. We also send reminders 24 hours and 6 hours before a deadline, so a booking does not lapse because the person who made it was on holiday that week.
About the voucher itself: it carries Travel DMC Group branding, not yours. If you'd rather your client only ever saw your name, send your own itinerary document and attach our voucher as the check-in paper. The hotel needs the voucher. The client mostly needs to know that you're the person they call. More on how hotel booking works for agents is on our B2B hotel booking page.
General information, not legal advice. This section summarises the government's guidance on the Package Travel Regulations 2018 and published commentary as of October 2026. Your position depends on how you sell, so check it with ABTA, your network or a travel lawyer.
Buying from a portal in Singapore does not move your obligations offshore. The Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018 apply to packages sold to travellers in the UK, wherever the seller is based. The person who has to provide the protection is the organiser. If you put the trip together and sell it in your own name, that is normally you.
A package is two or more different types of travel service for the same trip. The regulations recognise four types: carriage of passengers, accommodation, motor vehicle hire and other tourist services (excursions and guided tours, for example). An airport transfer is generally read as carriage of passengers. So a hotel and a transfer sold together is already two types.
Tours are treated differently. If the only combination is one of accommodation, transport or car hire plus a tourist service, it's a package only when that service makes up a significant share of the value or is advertised as an essential feature of the trip. The guidance gives 25% of the total value as a rule of thumb.
| What you sell together | Package under the 2018 regulations? |
|---|---|
| Hotel only | No. A single service is not a package. |
| Hotel and airport transfer | Usually yes: accommodation plus passenger transport. |
| Hotel and one small excursion | Probably not, unless the excursion is advertised as an essential feature or is around 25% or more of the price. |
| Hotel, transfers and tours | Yes. |
| Any of the above plus a flight | Yes, and ATOL comes into it as well. |
The guidance says plainly that tailor-made trips put together by travel agents count. Splitting the trip across several invoices does not take you out of it either, because several of the routes to a package apply even where there are separate contracts.
Organisers have to protect the money travellers pay for non-flight packages. There are three permitted routes:
We can't price these for you and won't pretend to. What we can say is that a supplier's financial strength, ours included, does not replace any of them.
When a package is cancelled and the traveller is owed money, the refund is due without undue delay and in any event within 14 days. That obligation runs from you to your client. It does not shrink because the hotel's terms are stricter, which is one reason we'd think twice before putting a non-refundable hotel rate inside a package.
Amending regulations were made on 22 April 2026 as SI 2026/455. They apply only to contracts entered into on or after 6 April 2027, so a booking made before that date stays under the current rules even if the client travels later. The changes that matter if you buy ground arrangements, as ABTA summarises them:
The open question is what counts as a single visit or contact. Fresh government guidance was expected, but we hadn't seen it published when this page was written in October 2026. If your current model is to sell the hotel, then send the client a separate link for transfers and tours, plan for that being treated as a package from next April.
ATOL protects packages that include a flight, plus some flight-only sales. We don't sell flights, so nothing you buy from DMC Quote is ATOL-protected and nothing we sell needs an ATOL. Ground-only packages are protected under the package regulations instead, by bonding, insurance or a trust account.
Add a flight and the picture changes. Sell our hotel and transfer with a flight as one package and it is flight-inclusive, so ATOL applies: either you hold your own ATOL, or you sell as an agent for an ATOL holder. The scheme's own guidance says agents selling for an ATOL holder don't need their own licence.
Our registration form has an optional field for ATOL details. It is optional because an agent who sells only ground arrangements does not need one.
VAT is easy to forget on ground arrangements, because the hotel and the tour are consumed thousands of miles away. TOMS is the reason it still needs some thought. The rules are in HMRC's VAT Notice 709/5. The short version:
Our supply to you is made from Singapore, so it sits outside TOMS on our side. Attraction tickets sold on their own may sit outside the scheme too, since admission tickets only count as designated travel services when they are sold with accommodation or transport. Take a real file to your accountant rather than a hypothetical one. Any UK element in a trip, and your own in-house costs, change the maths.
You top up your wallet in pounds by bank transfer, from £10 upwards. Card payment is not available for hotel bookings, so plan around transfers. Prices can be displayed in GBP, and the display rates update twice a day.
One detail is worth understanding properly. Behind the GBP label, the wallet ledger is held in Singapore dollars and converted at the rate on the day your top-up lands. So your exchange rate is fixed when you top up, not when you book. If sterling has a good week, a top-up then locks that rate in for the bookings that follow. In a bad week you might top up only what the next file needs.
Most accounts run on the prepaid wallet. Credit limits do exist, but they are granted case by case to established accounts, so don't build your cash flow around getting one in your first month. Our guide to wallets and credit limits covers how the two work side by side.
Our office is in Singapore, on UTC+8 all year with no clock change. That puts us eight hours ahead of London in winter and seven ahead during British Summer Time. A 09:00 start in Leeds is 17:00 in Singapore in January and 16:00 in July.
In practice the UK morning is the overlap. Send anything that needs a person before lunch, UK time.
Problems in resort are a different matter. The emergency number on every voucher, +65 8034 8190, is a 24/7 line, so a client stuck at a front desk at 3am local time has someone to call who can see the booking. For everything else, email [email protected].
Registration is free. There's no subscription and no minimum volume, so the only cost of trying it is the time it takes to compare a few rates against what you pay now.
Company name and address, contact details, the type of business you run, your current suppliers and roughly what you book each month. An IATA number is optional.
For a UK agency that means your Companies House registration and an insurance certificate. ATOL and VAT certificates are optional.
Our team reviews the application. Some document checks run automatically, and anything unclear goes to a person for review.
Transfer GBP to your wallet, add colleagues as sub-users if you need them, and price your next Asia file against net rates.
The registration guide walks through the form field by field. Register free →
No. We don't sell flights, so nothing you buy from DMC Quote is ATOL-protected and nothing we sell needs an ATOL. If you sell our ground arrangements together with a flight, that becomes a flight-inclusive package and ATOL applies to you, or to the ATOL holder you sell for.
Usually, yes. Under the Package Travel Regulations 2018 a package is two or more different types of travel service for the same trip, and an airport transfer is generally read as passenger transport. If you combine them and sell them in your own name, you are normally the organiser and must provide insolvency protection. This is general information, not legal advice.
Yes. You can top up your wallet in GBP by bank transfer, with a minimum top-up of 10 pounds. The wallet ledger converts to Singapore dollars at the rate on the day of the top-up, so your exchange rate is fixed when you top up rather than when you book. Card payment is not available for hotel bookings.
Your Companies House registration and an insurance certificate. ATOL and VAT certificates are optional, and so is an IATA number. Registration is free and our team reviews every application before the account is approved.
No. Hotel vouchers are issued by Travel DMC Group, our parent company, and carry our 24/7 emergency number, +65 8034 8190. If you want only your brand in front of the client, send your own itinerary and attach our voucher as the check-in document.
If you resell hotels, transfers or tours in your own name from a UK establishment, the Tour Operators' Margin Scheme probably applies, and HMRC's VAT Notice 709/5 says the margin is zero-rated where the travel is enjoyed outside the UK. A disclosed agent selling for commission is outside TOMS. Confirm your own position with an accountant.
No. Registration is free, with no subscription and no minimum booking volume. You pay the net rate for what you book and nothing else.
The UK morning, which overlaps with our working day in Singapore. Problems in resort go to the 24/7 emergency line printed on every voucher, +65 8034 8190.
DMC Quote (dmcquote.com) is a B2B travel portal run by Travel DMC Group, Singapore. UK travel agencies and homeworkers register free and book Asia and Middle East ground arrangements at net rates.
What you can book
1.5M+ hotels in 190+ countries, airport transfers at 15+ airports, attraction tickets and tours. Ground arrangements only: we don't sell flights.
Cost
Free to register. No subscription, no minimum volume. You pay the net rate and set your own selling price.
Paying from the UK
Wallet top-ups in GBP by bank transfer from £10. The rate is fixed at top-up. No card payment for hotels.
Documents for UK agencies
Companies House registration and an insurance certificate. ATOL, VAT and IATA details are optional.
Vouchers and support
Vouchers are issued by Travel DMC Group with the hotel confirmation number and a 24/7 emergency line, +65 8034 8190.
Your team
Sub-users with their own logins and permissions for hotels, transfers, tours, packages, bookings and the wallet.
Contact: [email protected] · +65 8034 8190 (Singapore) · +62 815-1153-4545 (Indonesia)
Free registration, GBP top-ups, and hotels, transfers, tickets and tours on one login.
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