HubSpot’s free CRM handles contacts, a deal pipeline and email tracking for up to 2 users. It has no itinerary builder, tour costing, supplier contracts or supplier payment tracking on any plan. Travel businesses that quote multi-day trips usually need a travel CRM software for those, or a custom HubSpot build.
| HubSpot (Free → Enterprise) | Sembark | |
| Starting price | $0 (2 users, 1,000 contacts) | A setup fee + Subscription Starts with ₹3000 + GST per month |
| Lead capture from B2B agents’ email, Meta/Google Ads, website | Forms; ads integration | ✓ |
| Automatic lead assignment | Paid plans | ✓ |
| Itinerary and quote builder | ✗ (custom build) | ✓ |
| Tour costing from your contracted rates | ✗ | ✓ |
| Supplier contracts and rate validity | ✗ | ✓ |
| Supplier ledger / payables | ✗ | ✓ |
| Customer payment links | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vouchers and proforma invoices | ✗ | ✓ |
| Onboarding and data migration | Paid onboarding on higher plans | Included in setup fee |
| Built for | Every industry | Travel only |
Every travel business starts the same way, trying to do more with less. So when it’s time to pick a CRM between a platform built exclusively for travel businesses, paid from the start, and a well-known brand, offers a CRM at a $0 price tag with a “get started in minutes” promise along with option to purchase paid tiers as the business scales, people naturally lean toward the second one. It feels like the safe choice, the one that can’t really go wrong.
You start with a free plan, and once you outgrow the free plan, you upgrade. But here’s the real question worth asking before you commit: are you simply paying for a larger version of the same generic tool, or would that money be better spent on something actually built for a travel business like yours?
That’s worth actually seeing for yourself, instead of just assuming. So let’s go tier by tier, feature by feature, on both platforms, and by the end of this blog, you’ll have a clear answer on which one actually fits your travel business.
What Is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a CRM that brings marketing, sales, customer service, and content tools together under one platform, used by businesses across just about every corner of the market, SaaS companies, real estate agencies, retail brands, and plenty of others in between.
It wasn’t built with any one industry in mind. It’s a broad, all-purpose system meant to work across sectors, not shaped around any single one.
At the heart of HubSpot sits its CRM. And since that’s the part travel agencies and DMCs would actually be evaluating, that’s what we’ll focus on for the rest of this blog, looking at its features, and what each one costs.
HubSpot CRM: What Travel Agencies & DMCs Actually Look For
A Travel Agency or a DMC shopping for a CRM isn’t looking for one or two features to tick off a checklist. They’re looking at the whole picture, how lead management works, whether building itineraries and quotes is quick or painful, and whether the whole team can actually work off the same system. Here’s how HubSpot holds up against that, feature by feature.
- Contact Management: It stores customer records, sales activity, and past conversations in one place, and pulls in company details automatically so your team has some context before reaching out. With the free CRM, you get up to 1,000 contacts, whereas paid plans raise that to 15 million.
- CRM Import: Moves your existing CRM data into HubSpot from another tool, so you’re not stuck re-entering years of client and booking history by hand when you switch systems.
- Deal Pipeline: Updates a deal automatically when you create one from an existing contact or company record, and tracks where it stands across every stage. The free version gives you 1 pipeline per object; running more than one needs a paid plan.
- Tasks & Activities: Puts your to-dos, meetings, and contact details on one dashboard instead of several tabs, so follow-ups don’t get scattered across notes or memory.
- Email Tracking: Tells you when a lead opens your email or clicks a link inside it, and saves that history on the contact record, so you’re not guessing when to follow up.
- User Management: Controls who can access which data, tools, and content, and handles permission changes from one dashboard, so sensitive info like payment details isn’t visible to everyone. The free version covers 2 users, whereas paid plans let you add more seats.
- Ticketing: Logs a customer query or complaint as a ticket in a shared inbox, with tags, notes, and history attached, and lets you assign or automate tickets, connecting to your existing tools for resolution.
- Payment Links: Let you create and share a payment link, embedded in an email, website, form, or meeting, so customers can pay by card, ACH, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. It’s free as long as you connect a payment account, but it only tracks payments you receive from customers, nothing that you owe a supplier.
- Reporting Dashboard: Pulls marketing, sales, revenue, and service data into one place, with dashboards for each team and controls over who sees what. Free gives you 10 dashboards and 50 reports each; the paid Starter package raises that to 30 dashboards.
- HubSpot Mobile App: Lets you check contacts, deals, and dashboards, or update a deal and log a note, from your phone, so your team isn’t stuck at a desk to move a booking forward. Free on both iOS and Android.
Pricing
Here’s what each tier actually costs, and what it unlocks:
- Free: $0. Up to 2 users, 1000 contacts. Covers the basics: Contact management, Deal pipelines, CRM import, Breeze Assistant (AI-powered Assistant), & Reporting dashboard
- Smart CRM Starter: Starts at $7/seat/month billed annually, or $20 billed monthly {“Prices as of September 2026”, refer this: https://www.hubspot.in/pricing/suite}.
Popular features it covers are: Required fields, Permission sets, Multiple currencies, and multiple pipelines on top of everything in Free.
- Professional: Starts at $50/month per seat, and it covers Everything in Starter + AI customer agent, Duplicate management, Standard contact scoring, Calculated properties, and Custom reporting
- Enterprise: Starts at $75/month per seat, and popular feature it covers are Everything in Professional package + Custom objects, Organize teams, Single sign-on, and Field-level permissions
So here’s the honest picture: the basics such as contacts, a pipeline, tasks, a shared inbox for tickets, are genuinely free. But the moment your business grows, you’re reaching for a paid plan just to keep up, and even on the highest tier, you’re still not getting anything built for the way a travel business actually runs. No itinerary builder, no supplier tracking, nothing built for how a DMC actually runs. Just a bigger version of a CRM made for everyone else.
Imagine Your Day- Running Your Travel Business on HubSpot
Let’s start by imagining you’re on the free plan, like most travel businesses starting out. Your phone buzzes, a WhatsApp enquiry comes, a family is enquiring about a trip to Bali. You open HubSpot, create the contact, add a note about their requirements, simple enough so far.
The free plan lets you assign an owner by hand. HubSpot does offer auto-routing of leads, but on a paid plan. As it’s an important part of your business, let’s say you upgrade.
Next you sit down to build the itinerary. Except HubSpot has no place for that at all, not even on a paid plan. No built-in itinerary builder. Agencies build one with custom objects on Enterprise or pay a HubSpot partner to.
By afternoon, the family’s confirmed. You mark the enquiry as converted and move it to the end of your pipeline. On the other hand, the resort you booked for one of your trips needs its deposit by tomorrow. You check HubSpot for what you owe, but it doesn’t offer real-time payment tracking with respect to suppliers. So you open the supplier spreadsheet you’ve kept since before you even had a CRM.
Before logging off, you glance at your dashboard. It shows you contacts, deals, activity, but what it doesn’t show is quote-to-booking conversions, real-time reports of your net profits, or supplier dues.
At the end of the day, sales still handle enquiries and assign them manually. Ops still builds itineraries from scratch step by step. Reservations still tracks suppliers on a spreadsheet. You close the laptop thinking maybe I need a better plan.
But it will not. The CRM changed what you use, not what your team does. And it’s never going to offer important features like itinerary builder, payment tracking, supplier ledgers, as it was never part of HubSpot’s roadmap, free or paid.
The Missing Piece
Lead distribution. Itinerary building. Automated follow-ups and reminders. Payment tracking on both the customer and supplier side, and that’s just scratching the surface. This is what running a travel business actually looks like, every single day, and none of it is optional or something you can add on later.
A CRM built to serve every industry at once was never quite going to handle all of it well.
What actually works is a CRM built just for this industry. And that’s the gap Sembark was built to close.
What Is Sembark?
Sembark is a CRM built only for one industry- travel. DMCs & Tour operators are the businesses it was designed for. Every feature inside it is built to manage a real step in your operations, from the first enquiry to the final payment.
That focus is easy to see in the numbers. Over 1,200 travel businesses across 28+ countries run their operations on Sembark, and it holds a 4.9/5 rating on Google, built by a team that’s spent years sitting inside travel businesses, watching where leads get lost, where itineraries eat up hours, and where money quietly slips through the cracks between suppliers and customers.
Where HubSpot gives you a general purpose toolkit and expects you to build the travel specific parts yourself, Sembark starts from the actual booking lifecycle of a travel business, from lead to itinerary to confirmation to payment to on-ground operations. Here’s what that actually looks like, feature by feature.
Features:
- Lead Management: Auto-captures leads from multiple channels such as B2B Travel Agents, Meta/Google Ads,Website, Google Forms and 3rd Party Lead APIs, into one centralized dashboard, then auto distributes them to the right salesperson.
- Smart Itinerary Builder: Create quotations in 60 seconds with auto tour costing, multi-currency support, and component-wise pricing
- Advance Follow-ups & Reminders: Schedules and tracks a follow-up for every lead, triggering a 3-step reminder across email, in-system, and mobile so nothing gets missed once it’s due.
- Supplier and Contract Management: Centralizes hotel, transport, and activity contracts in one place, with rates and validity periods linked directly to quotations and bookings.
- Smart Tour Calendar: A real-time centralized, color-coded calendar showing every ongoing trip’s bookings, schedules, activity updates, and payment status in real time.
- Payment and Collection Tracking: A single dashboard showing exactly what’s paid, pending, or overdue, so accounts, sales, and operations always work off the same numbers instead of chasing updates across teams.
- Suppliers Ledger: A real-time account of costs, payments, advances, and outstanding balances for every supplier, auto-linked the moment a booking is confirmed.
- Instant Vouchers and Proforma Invoice: Instantly generates error-free trip and hotel vouchers along with proforma invoices on booking confirmation, with billing and trip details auto-fetched from confirmed trip data, ready to share as PDF, Word, or message.
- Role-Based Access: Control who sees and does each activity by assigning roles and permissions, so sales, operations, and finance teams work securely, efficiently, and only within their defined responsibilities
- Real-Time Reports: Real-time visibility into leads, sales, follow-ups, conversions, and revenue, with dashboards that refresh automatically and one-click reports by individual, team, destination, or time period.
Beyond the Basics: Where AI Steps In
Every feature above solves a manual step in running a travel business, but why stop there. Not every part of the job needs a person’s judgment, some of it is just reading an enquiry and typing the right details into the system. That’s exactly the kind of work Sembark hands off to AI, so your team’s time goes toward selling and planning, not repetitive work.
- AI Email Reader: reads every incoming enquiry email the moment it lands, pulls out the quoting details automatically, and turns it into a structured lead.
- AI Itinerary Builder: turns basic trip details into a complete itinerary automatically using your pre-loaded database.
- AI Itinerary Importer: works the other way around, taking an existing itinerary and turning it into your own branded quote in seconds.
Pricing
Sembark doesn’t use flat, one-size pricing like HubSpot. Instead, it comes down to two simple parts:
A one-time setup fee: Covers onboarding, moving your supplier and contract data into the system, and training your team until they’re confident using it. Billing only starts once your team is actually ready to go.
A monthly fee per user: This is where cost depends on your business. And because pricing depends on your destinations and team size, Sembark doesn’t publish one flat rate, it’s quoted based on what your business actually needs.
No lock-in, or annual commitment, pay only for what your team uses, month to month.
Now Imagine the Same Day, on Sembark
Same morning, same business.
- A WhatsApp enquiry comes in, a family asking about a trip to Bali. Auto-Lead Capture picks it up the moment it lands, and Auto-Lead Distribution assigns it to the right salesperson automatically.
- Time for the itinerary. The Smart Itinerary Builder puts together a full quotation in about 2 minutes, hotels, transport, activities, costing, and markup all worked out together.
- Once booking is confirmed, it moves onto the Smart Tour Calendar, so sales and operations are looking at the same schedule. A voucher and proforma invoice generate instantly, no manual drafting.
- Remember the resort that needs its deposit by tomorrow. Real-Time Payment Tracking already shows it, what’s due, what’s paid, incoming from the customer and outgoing to the supplier, all in one view. The Suppliers Ledger backs it up with the fuller picture, costs, advances, and outstanding balance for that resort, auto-linked the moment the booking was confirmed and updated live as payments come in.
- Before logging off, Real-Time Reports shows leads, conversions, and revenue, refreshed automatically, by destination, by team, by time period.
Sales isn’t assigning enquiries by hand. Ops isn’t rebuilding itineraries from scratch. Reservations isn’t tracking suppliers on a spreadsheet. The work that used to happen outside the CRM now happens inside it.
The Bottom Line
Anyone can sign up for HubSpot. That’s not quite the same as it being built for you.
Even at an Enterprise plan, you’re paying for scale, not specialization. More users, more permissions, more structure, but none of that scale gets you any closer to what actually matters, tracking a booking end to end, managing a supplier relationship, or keeping a tour running on schedule.
Sembark starts from the opposite place. It was never built to work for everyone, it was built as a travel CRM software around the one thing that actually matters here, running your travel business the way it’s meant to run.
See it for yourself, book a free demo with Sembark today.
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