What to look for when buying a travel ERP

Most Egyptian travel agencies replace spreadsheets in stages: bookings first, then invoicing, then everything else catches up later. Before you sign anything, here is the checklist we would use ourselves.

Start with the day-to-day, not the demo

A demo shows the happy path. Ask instead: what happens when a supplier changes a hotel allotment two days before departure? Can the system handle a group booking that splits across three buses? The answer tells you more than any feature list.

The checklist

Capability	Why it matters
ETA e-invoicing built in	Egyptian Tax Authority compliance from the invoice’s first minute, not a bolt-on integration that can drift out of sync
One data model for bookings, hotels and transport	Nothing gets re-entered by hand between systems
A dedicated CRM	Follow-ups happen because the system tracks them, not because someone remembered
Real reporting, not exports	Margin visibility the day a booking closes, not the day someone builds a spreadsheet
Runs in production today	A platform still in pilot with its first customer is a different risk than one running real bookings

Where e-invoicing actually bites

E-invoicing is not a checkbox. If it is not built into the same system that creates the invoice, someone is retyping totals into a second tool — exactly the process the ERP was supposed to remove. See how RihlaERP built it in.

What this looked like for one agency

We wrote up the ten-phase build for one Egyptian destination-management company: spreadsheets and chat threads in, one system with e-invoicing out.