A booking supplier is who you're actually booking a component through - the hotel, airline, tour operator, or DMC you'll pay to fulfill it. You assign a supplier on the component itself under its Pricing & Booking tab, and it's used well beyond that one screen: it's what shows on the Bookings tab and the invoice, and it's the source for that item's Terms & Conditions and cancellation policy.
This article covers assigning a supplier on any component type. If you're specifically setting up payment authorization, see Payment Schedule & Authorization Requests, which touches supplier assignment as one step in that flow.
What a booking supplier is, and why you'd assign one
Assigning a supplier to a component does three things:
Shows on the Bookings tab: the trip-wide Bookings tab lists a Supplier column for every component, so you can see at a glance who each item is booked through.
Shows on the invoice: the supplier name is pulled onto generated invoices for that item.
Sources Terms & Conditions and the cancellation policy: if the supplier has a saved T&C template, it's fetched in automatically; if not, you can add one inline (see below), and it's saved back to that supplier for next time.
A supplier is not required to build or price a component - you can leave it unset while you're still drafting. But it (along with a price and a start date) is one of the requirements for making an item ready for collecting credit card authorization from clients to pay for the bookings using the authorised card upto the authorised amount, more details are covered in Payment Schedule & Authorization Requests.
Search and assign a supplier
Open the component's edit drawer and go to the Pricing & Booking tab.
Under Booking, find the field labeled Select the supplier you'll book through.
Start typing in the search box. A dropdown filters the suppliers as you type, grouped into sections: your parent agency's suppliers, your sub-agency's suppliers, and independent suppliers. (The independent list draws on TripLoft's prebuilt catalog, and if a supplier isn't there, you can create one.)
Click a supplier to assign it. TripLoft immediately checks that supplier's saved Terms & Conditions and cancellation policy templates and, if it has any, fetches the first one into this item.
To add more policies, click Add. You can select an existing policy or create a new one, and you can attach several to a single item. Multiple policies let you cover different aspects of a booking's terms, so you can pick exactly the ones that apply.
If the name you type isn't in the directory, the dropdown offers a Create "[name]" option. Clicking it creates a new supplier under that name, which you can then add Terms & Conditions and a cancellation policy to. It's worth checking your directory first so a typo or a slightly different spelling doesn't leave you with near-duplicate supplier records.
Changing the supplier after Terms & Conditions are already attached
If an item already has Terms & Conditions and/or a cancellation policy attached, and you search and pick a different supplier, both are replaced:
If the newly selected supplier has its own saved T&C and cancellation policy templates, those replace whatever was attached from the previous supplier.
If the newly selected supplier has no saved templates yet, the item's Terms & Conditions and cancellation policy are cleared, and you'll need to add them fresh for the new supplier (which, as above, also saves them as that supplier's new template).
There's no merge or prompt to keep the old policy - swapping the supplier always defers to the new supplier's own data. If you only meant to correct a typo in the same supplier's name rather than actually change who you're booking through, search for and select the correct existing entry rather than typing a new variation.
How this differs from the Suppliers directory
Assigning a supplier to a component and managing your Suppliers directory are two different actions that touch the same data:
The Suppliers directory (Agency Suppliers Template, under Suppliers in Settings, in the Admin section) is your agency's master list of suppliers: their name, category, website, and reusable Terms & Conditions and cancellation policy templates. Curating this list, adding, editing, and archiving suppliers, is limited to Owners and Admins of the agency. Agents don't manage the directory, but the suppliers in it are available to everyone when assigning to a booking.
Assigning a supplier to a component (this article) is a per-item action inside a specific proposal, available to anyone building a proposal. You're picking which of your agency's suppliers this particular flight, hotel, or activity is booked through. It doesn't change or duplicate the supplier's directory record; it just links to it (and, as noted above, clicking Create for a name that doesn't exist yet adds it to your independent suppliers, available only to you, not to your agency's shared directory).
In short: assign a supplier to each item from inside the proposal, and save reusable Terms & Conditions for any supplier under Templates so you can attach them in a click next time. See Create Supplier T&C Templates
