When a departure is opened, the costing sheet is usually built around a target headcount — "on the basis of forty". What happens if sales fall short of that number is often discovered after departure. A break-even point answers the question while sales are still running: how many passengers does this departure need to cover its costs?
Why the simple formula falls short
The textbook calculation is easy: divide fixed cost by contribution per person. In tour operations that formula misleads, because some costs are neither fixed nor linear per person.
Complimentary staff places step up: one free place per forty passengers, two per eighty. Those places generate cost but no revenue. Percentage-based items depend on the sale total, so they move with headcount too. The simple formula sees neither, and makes the departure look more profitable than it is.
The reliable method: re-run the engine
The dependable approach is not to write a separate break-even formula but to re-run the costing calculation itself at different headcounts. The first number where profit crosses zero is the break-even point.
The practical benefit is that the costing screen and the break-even screen cannot drift apart. With two separate formulas, updating one and forgetting the other leaves the agency looking at two different figures with no way to tell which to trust.
Looking at each room category separately
Producing a single break-even number requires assuming a room mix, and that assumption changes with every departure. The honest presentation puts the categories side by side: a departure that breaks even at twenty-five in twin rooms may never break even in singles.
Losing money on single rooms is normal; an agency opens them because it has to. The real news is a departure that does not break even in any room mix.
When the price does not cover the cost
Sometimes the sale price does not cover the per-person cost at all. In that case there is no break-even point — the loss grows with every passenger added.
It matters that the software does not invent a number here. Saying "it breaks even at sixty" produces the wrong decision; the right move is not to sell more but to change the price.