u/Delicious-Life-4724

A potential client reached out to me with a complicated trip for their leadership team. It was 5 people, multiple cities and a conference in the middle. I spent around 3-4 hours working on it, finding better flight routes, improving the schedule and making sure that they were not wasting half the trip in transit.
I sent them the full plan, ready to book. They replied saying, “This is exactly what we needed” and then they stopped responding.
A week later, I found out that they booked the same itinerary with another agency since it was about $20 cheaper per person. Honestly, I know this is partly my fault as I shared the full plan before anything was confirmed because I thought it would build trust.
For other travel agents, how do you handle this?
Do you charge a planning fee upfront, only share a rough outline first or just accept that some clients will do this?

Small restaurant owner here, I’ve been wanting to send out better looking emails for weekend specials, catering bookings, private events, and loyalty offers instead of those plain text emails that look super outdated. I’m looking into custom HTML email templates and trying to figure out which email provider actually supports this stuff without being a pain to set up.

I need something that looks clean, works well on mobile, has good deliverabilty and ideally doesn’t require me to be super technical every time I wanna send a campaign.

What are you guys using right now for your business email plus marketing emails? Any providers you’d recommend?