AI rate sheet import that never prices a trip unreviewed.

AI rate sheet import is the workflow that gets contracted lodge rates into tour operator software without anyone re-typing them. You upload the rate sheet exactly as the lodge sent it, as a PDF, a Word file or an Excel workbook. The AI reads it into structured seasonal rates: season dates, room types, board basis, child bands. You review every line and confirm. Only confirmed rates price anything.

Itero Desk is operations software for safari and tour operators: itineraries, quotes, proposals, invoices, CRM and pricing in one workspace, on web and mobile, with AI assistance built in. This page covers one job inside that workspace: the intake. The tour pricing software page explains the engine that turns rates into a priced trip. This page explains how the rates get into that engine in the first place, because an engine is only as good as what it is fed.

Book a demo. Bring one of your own lodge rate sheets and watch it become structured rates on the call. Book a demo

The rate sheet problem, stated plainly.

Every season, every lodge you contract with sends a new rate sheet. One arrives as a PDF designed for print. One is a Word document with the rates in a table halfway down page four. One is an Excel workbook with a tab per camp. No two look alike, and none of them match last year's layout either.

Under the different layouts, each sheet carries the same kinds of information: season bands with their date ranges, room types, board basis, child policies with age cut-offs, and the rates themselves. Somebody at the desk has to move all of it into wherever pricing happens. For most operators that place is a spreadsheet, and moving it means re-typing, sheet after sheet, season after season.

Re-typing a season of contracted rates costs days. That is the visible cost. The invisible cost is worse: every typo becomes a mispriced trip. Type a full board rate into the half board column and every quote built on that cell is wrong. Put a season boundary one week out and shoulder-season trips price at peak, or peak trips at shoulder. Nobody catches the error at typing time, because there is nothing to catch it against. It surfaces months later, in a supplier invoice or an awkward client email, and the difference usually comes out of your margin. A mispriced trip is not an admin slip; it is money lost.

There is a structural cost too. When the typed-up rates live in one person's spreadsheet, the pricing knowledge of the whole company lives in one laptop. When that person is away, nobody can quote with confidence.

The guide on working with lodge rate sheets covers the trade craft in the open: what the sheets contain, how the codes differ between lodges, what to check the day a new sheet arrives. This page covers the software that removes the re-typing.

How AI rate sheet import works.

The workflow in Itero Desk has four steps, and the third one is the point.

Upload the sheet. PDF, Word or Excel, exactly as the lodge sent it. No conversion, no cleanup, no export-to-CSV ritual first.
Itero AI reads it into structured seasonal rates. Season bands with their start and end dates, room types, board basis, child bands. The sheet's prose and print layout become rows a pricing engine can actually use.
You review every line before confirming. The parsed rates sit in an editable review screen, ready to compare against the source. You correct anything the AI got wrong, then confirm. The review step is mandatory by design: nothing prices a trip unreviewed.
Confirmed rates feed the desk. The cost engine, the Ballpark quick quote on leads, proposals and invoices all price from what you confirmed, and only from what you confirmed.

What the review screen is for.

Checking a parsed sheet is a different job from typing one. The numbers are already in rows; your work is comparison, not transcription. You read down the parsed seasons and confirm the dates match the contract. You check that the board basis codes were mapped the way this lodge means them. You check the child bands against the policy wording. Anything wrong, you edit in place. Anything right, you leave alone. Then you confirm, and the rates go live for pricing.

The order matters. The AI does the mechanical reading, the desk does the judgement, and the judgement always comes last. That is the house rule across all of Itero Desk: AI assists, the desk decides.

What the AI reads, field by field.

A lodge rate sheet is denser than it looks. This is what the import extracts, and what your review is checking in each case.

On the lodge's sheet	What Itero AI makes of it	What you check in review
Season bands ("green season", "06 Jan to 28 Feb")	A season with explicit start and end dates	Dates match the contract, with no gaps or overlaps you did not intend
Room types (double, twin, triple, family, suite)	Room types the builder's Stays step can price	The names map to how your desk actually sells the rooms
Board basis codes and wording	One of six board bases: room only, B&B, half board, full board, all inclusive, game package	The code this lodge uses means what the mapping says it means
Child policy paragraphs	Child rate bands by age	Age cut-offs and sharing rules match the contract wording
The rates themselves	Structured seasonal rates, ready for the cost engine	Each number against the source sheet

The detail is the reason this cannot be a dumb copy-paste tool. The cost engine downstream prices multi-room parties, child rate bands and per-day meal plans, so the import has to capture seasons, rooms, board and child rules as structure, not as text. A rate that says "HB" in a footnote is useless to software until something turns it into "half board, this room, these dates", and that is exactly the conversion the import does and the review verifies.

What the AI will not do.

Software that touches your prices earns trust by what it refuses to do. Four refusals are built into the import.

It will not invent a price. If a rate is not on the sheet, it does not exist in the system. Itero AI never prices from imagination anywhere in the product; costs come from imported rates and the park fee library, nothing else.
It will not fill a gap with a guess. If the lodge's sheet skips a period, that period stays empty. When a trip date later falls into the gap, the desk sees a rate-gap warning at quote time instead of a silently wrong number.
It will not pass an estimate off as a contract rate. There is an optional closest year setting that can price a date from the nearest season you do have, and it is always labelled estimated, on the cost panel and in your face, never buried.
It will not hide behind a plan gate. Rate sheet import is available on every plan, and every plan's monthly AI allowance covers imports like any other AI action.

The rate-gap warning deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the safety net under the whole workflow. A wrong price that announces itself costs you a minute; a wrong price that stays quiet costs you the margin on a trip. The engine is built to make missing knowledge loud: no covering rate, no silent price.

See it on your own paper. Send a real lodge sheet ahead of the demo and watch it parsed, reviewed and priced live. Book a demo

Where confirmed rates go.

A confirmed rate is not a record in a filing cabinet. It goes to work at once, everywhere the desk prices.

The cost engine. In the itinerary builder, the Costs step prices each stay from the seasonal rate that matches the travel date, the room and the board basis, from room only through game package. The live cost panel updates while the trip is being built, so pricing is never a separate job done later. The tour pricing software page covers the engine in full, and the tour cost calculator page walks through how one trip's cost builds up line by line.
Ballpark. In the leads pipeline, the Ballpark panel gives a fast indicative price on a lead before anyone builds a full itinerary, drawing on the same rates. A ballpark from real contracted rates is worth sending the same day; a ballpark from memory is a guess with a currency symbol.
Proposals and invoices. The price table in the client proposal and the invoice generated from the won itinerary trace back to the same confirmed rates. The number the client sees and the cost sheet the desk sees cannot drift apart, because they are the same data.

Margin sits on top of all of it as its own visible layer, and any line can still be overridden by hand on a specific trip: accommodation, vehicle, guide, transfers, flights, optional activities, park fees or additional costs. The import gets the contracted truth in; the manual overrides handle the exceptions no contract covers.

The same pattern for park fees, flights and itineraries.

Rate sheets are not the only paper the trade runs on, so the same read, review, confirm pattern repeats across the desk.

Park fee imports. Itero Desk's cost engine is tuned for fifteen safari countries and the way their real fee authorities charge, and park fee imports follow the same flow when a schedule needs to come in from a document.
Flight rate imports. Carrier rate documents go through the identical read, review, confirm steps, feeding the flights and carriers in your library.
Itinerary import. The AI can read a whole trip from a PDF, a Word file, a spreadsheet, a pasted email, or even a photographed or scanned document, and draft it in the safari itinerary builder for editing. Useful when an agent sends a sample trip, or when a desk is moving years of old itineraries off old files.

None of these skip review either. The pattern is one habit learned once: upload, read, check, confirm. For how the whole desk fits together around it, from enquiry to invoice, see the full safari tour operator software page.

Honest limits, and what it costs.

The limits first, because trust survives contact with a demo.

Some sheets need manual cleanup in review. Merged cells, rates hidden in footnotes, layouts designed for a printed brochure rather than for data: the AI reads most of them well, but an unusual layout can come through with lines that need fixing by hand. That is what the review screen is for, and it is still comparison work rather than transcription work.

The AI reads sheets; it does not negotiate them. Chasing a lodge for the missing new season, querying an ambiguous child policy, arguing a rate: those stay desk jobs. The import starts when the sheet exists.

And a desk with three lodges and rates that rarely change can simply type them in by hand in the same screens. The import earns its keep as the pile of sheets grows each season.

On cost: every plan includes a monthly AI allowance, and rate sheet imports draw from it like any other AI action, with no separate import fee and no plan gate. Starter is $74.99 per month ($59.99 per month billed annually) and includes 300 AI actions a month; Pro is $109.99 per month ($89.99 per month billed annually) with 1,200. One-time AI top-ups never expire, which suits the trade's rhythm: rate sheets arrive in bursts when new seasons publish, not in a smooth monthly stream. Every new workspace starts with a 30-day trial of the full Pro feature set, no credit card. Current numbers live on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions.

What file formats does AI rate sheet import accept?

PDF, Word and Excel, which covers how lodges actually send rate sheets. You upload the file exactly as it arrived, with no conversion or cleanup first. Itero AI reads it into structured seasonal rates covering season dates, room types, board basis and child bands, and everything it reads waits for your review before it can price a trip.

Does the AI ever price a trip from unreviewed rates?

No. The review step is mandatory by design. Every parsed line waits for a person to check it against the source sheet and confirm it, and only confirmed rates reach the cost engine, the Ballpark quick quote, proposals and invoices. If the AI misreads a number, you correct it in review and the wrong number never touches a quote.

What happens when a rate sheet has a missing season?

The gap stays a gap. Itero AI does not fill missing periods with a guess. If a trip date later falls inside that gap, the desk sees a rate-gap warning at quote time instead of a silently wrong price. An optional closest year setting can price from the nearest season you do have, and that price is always labelled estimated.

Is rate sheet import available on every plan?

Yes. Import is not a premium add-on. Every plan includes a monthly AI allowance, and rate sheet imports draw from it like any other AI action: Starter includes 300 AI actions a month and Pro includes 1,200, with one-time top-ups that never expire for heavy import seasons. The current allowances are listed on the pricing page.

Where do my rates live after import?

In your workspace. The rates you import are your contracted rates, and pricing across Itero Desk reads from them and from the park fee library, never from imagination. Quotes, proposals and invoices are built from what you imported and confirmed in that workspace, so the rates behind every price are always yours, visible and editable.

Can Itero AI import a whole itinerary, not just rates?

Yes. Itinerary import reads a trip from a PDF, a Word file, a spreadsheet, a pasted email, or even a photographed or scanned document, and drafts it in the itinerary builder for you to edit. It follows the same principle as rate import: the AI drafts, you review, and the desk decides what stands.

What if a sheet has an unusual layout?

Some sheets need manual cleanup in review: merged cells, rates buried in footnotes, layouts made for print rather than for data. The review screen is built for exactly that, and you edit any parsed line before confirming. Any cost line can also be overridden by hand later on a specific trip, so an odd sheet never blocks a quote.

The next season's sheets do not need days of typing. Book a demo and watch one of your own rate sheets become confirmed, quotable rates. Book a demo · Existing customer? Sign in