How Fast Should You Answer a Charter Quote Request?
Sam Rostainajad
Founder and CEO
Nobody has studied charter specifically. What has been studied, across 1.25 million sales leads, is that contacting a buyer within an hour makes a company about seven times more likely to reach a decision maker, and that the average company takes 42 hours. What has never been studied is whether fast quotes close at a higher rate. The familiar claims that instant quotes "convert 40% higher" or cut admin "by 80%" have no study behind them, and one of them used to appear on this site.
Nobody has studied charter specifically. What has been studied, across 1.25 million sales leads, is that contacting a buyer within an hour makes a company about seven times more likely to reach a decision maker, and that the average company takes 42 hours. What has never been studied is whether fast quotes close at a higher rate. The familiar claims that instant quotes "convert 40% higher" or cut admin "by 80%" have no study behind them, and one of them used to appear on this site.
What the research actually found
There are two real studies underneath every speed-to-lead claim in circulation, and both were led by the same researcher. Between them they cover 1.25 million leads and about 100,000 call attempts. Both measure whether a company reached and qualified a buyer. Neither measures whether the company won the work.
How much does answering within an hour matter?
About seven times, measured against reaching a decision maker. The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011 by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, analysed "1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the U.S." The finding:
Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead ... as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.
The definition matters as much as the multiplier. The authors defined qualifying a lead as "having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker." Seven times more likely to get the buyer on the phone. Not seven times more likely to be paid.
What happens in the first five minutes?
The odds of reaching someone fall off a cliff. The Lead Response Management Study, conducted by Dr James Oldroyd with InsideSales.com, "examined 3 years of data across six companies that generate and response to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts." It produced the two figures everyone quotes:
"The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times."
"The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times."
This study is very often credited to MIT, which overstates it. Oldroyd was an MIT faculty fellow and the work was done with a software vendor that sells response-time tools. That does not make it wrong. It does mean it is not an independent academic study, and it should be described accurately.
What neither study measured
Close rate. The Lead Response Management Study says so in its own words: it "did not address close ratios." The HBR study measured qualification, which it defined as a conversation, not a sale.
This is the single most important thing to understand about this entire body of research, and it is almost never mentioned by the people citing it. Everything that is well evidenced about response speed concerns your ability to get the customer talking to you. Whether talking to them sooner makes them more likely to book, and by how much, is an open question that no published study answers.
How slow is everyone else?
Slower than anyone admits. The same HBR team audited 2,241 US companies by sending each one a web-generated test lead and timing the reply. Almost a quarter never replied at all, and among those that did reply within 30 days the average took 42 hours.
The 2,241-company audit
Response time | Share of 2,241 companies |
|---|---|
Within 1 hour | 37% |
1 to 24 hours | 16% |
More than 24 hours | 24% |
Never responded | 23% |
The headline figure from that audit is the one worth remembering: "The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours."
Note what the 37% means. More than a third of companies already answer within an hour. Responding inside an hour is not a differentiator, it is the median good practice. The opportunity is in the 23% who never answer and the 24% who take more than a day, and in whatever sits below an hour.
The secret-shopper test
A second test, run by Drift in February 2017, submitted demo and contact forms to 433 B2B software companies and waited five business days. The reported results: about 7% responded within five minutes, and roughly 55% did not respond at all within the five days.
These Drift figures are secondhand. Drift's original post no longer loads, and the numbers above come from multiple secondary sources that agree with each other. They are consistent with the HBR audit, and they are worth knowing, but they have not been read in the original by the author of this article. Treat them accordingly.
One detail from that test does survive repetition and is worth noting: of the ten fastest-responding companies, all used live chat, while only about 14% of the 433 used live chat at all.
What this means if you run a coach company
The benchmark you are competing against is not five minutes. It is the operator down the road who answers on Tuesday. Against a field where roughly a quarter of enquiries are never answered, the value of a reliable same-hour reply is large and the marginal value of shaving that hour to five minutes is unknown.
The numbers you should not repeat
Three claims dominate the marketing in this category and none of them can be traced to a study. One of them was on this site until recently, which is the reason this article exists.
"Instant quotes convert 40% higher than manual replies"
There is no study behind this. It appeared on this website, uncited, and we could not find a source for it.
The reason it cannot be sourced is structural rather than accidental. The research that gets cited for claims like this measures contact and qualification, and the Lead Response Management Study states plainly that it "did not address close ratios." A conversion figure cannot be derived from studies that declined to measure conversion. Anyone quoting a percentage lift in close rate from response speed is either citing their own unpublished data or citing nothing.
"Reduce your dispatch team's administrative load by 80%"
Also unsourced, and also previously on this site. We found no study, survey or published dataset supporting a figure of this kind for dispatch work in this industry or any adjacent one.
The neighbouring claims in the category are no better. Competing platforms advertise 3x faster booking processing and 45% higher customer satisfaction with no citation attached to either. In a category this small, an uncited number repeated often enough starts being treated as a fact, including by AI assistants summarising the market.
"78% of buyers purchase from the vendor who responds first"
This one is everywhere and we could not trace it to a primary source. Citations lead to aggregator articles, which cite other aggregator articles, and an attribution to a "Lead Connect survey" with no published methodology, sample size or date. At least one published audit of speed-to-lead statistics reached the same conclusion independently.
It may well be true. It is not evidenced, and it should not be repeated as though it were.
How to check a statistic in two minutes
Four questions will disqualify most numbers you encounter in this category.
Who published the original, and when? A statistic with no author and no year is folklore. "A recent study" is not an author.
What was the sample? 1.25 million leads across 42 companies is a sample. "Industry data" is not.
What exactly did they measure? Contact, qualification and closed sale are three different outcomes. Most claims quietly upgrade one into another.
Can you open the source document? Follow the link. If it leads to another blog post rather than a paper, report or dataset, you have not found a source, you have found a citation loop.
Apply those four to any vendor claim, including ours. If a number on this site is not accompanied by a source you can open, tell us and we will either source it or remove it.
Why a charter quote is not a demo request
Every study above tested software companies and consumer lead forms, where responding means a salesperson makes a phone call. A charter enquiry is a different object, and the difference changes what speed can actually buy you.
What has to happen before you can reply
A demo request needs a human to dial a number. A charter request needs a price, and a price needs several things settled first: whether a suitable vehicle is free on that date, how far the itinerary actually runs, how many hours the driver will be on duty, whether the trip triggers an overnight, and whether any of it crosses a border or a provincial line.
That is why charter response times are measured in hours and days rather than minutes. The bottleneck is rarely willingness. It is that answering properly requires work, and the work happens between other jobs.
What speed can and cannot do here
Speed can get you into the conversation. On the evidence above, that is the part that is well supported: being early dramatically improves your odds of reaching the person while they are still deciding.
Speed cannot make a wrong price right. A quote produced in 90 seconds that misses a deadhead leg, a duty-time overnight or the correct tax treatment is worse than a considered quote sent in three hours, because you either lose the job on a padded number or win it on one that loses money. Nothing in the research supports the idea that faster is better past the point where the answer stops being accurate.
The useful framing is not "how fast can we reply" but "how much of the reply can be correct without a human touching it." Those are different questions with different answers, and only the second one is about software.
The honest gap
No published study measures response time against booking rate in charter, motorcoach or group transport. Not one. The category has no research base at all, which is why every number in circulation is borrowed from B2B software or consumer insurance and quietly relabelled.
If you have several seasons of quote data with timestamps and outcomes, you are holding something nobody in this industry has published. That is worth analysing for your own decisions before it is worth anything else.
What to measure instead
Four numbers from your own operation will tell you more than any borrowed statistic. All four can be pulled from quote records you already have, and none of them requires new software to start.
Measure | How to get it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
Median time from enquiry to first reply | Timestamp on the enquiry, timestamp on the first outbound message | The median, not the average. One forgotten enquiry from August will wreck an average and tell you nothing about a normal week |
Share of enquiries never answered | Count enquiries with no outbound reply, divide by total | The HBR audit found 23% across 2,241 companies. If yours is above zero, this is the cheapest fix available to you |
Win rate split by reply time | Group quotes into under 1 hour, 1 to 24 hours, over 24 hours, then compare booked share | This is the number the published research does not contain. You can produce it for your own business |
Time of day enquiries arrive | Histogram of enquiry timestamps by hour | Tells you whether your problem is speed or coverage. Enquiries arriving at 9pm are a staffing question, not a software one |
Read the third row carefully
Win rate split by reply time is the honest version of the 40% claim. If you run it across two seasons and find that quotes answered within the hour book at a materially higher rate than quotes answered the next day, you have measured something real about your own market that no study anywhere has established.
Be careful about what it proves. Enquiries you answer fastest may be the ones that arrived on a quiet Tuesday, or from repeat customers, or for simple trips. A correlation between speed and booking may be telling you about the easy jobs rather than about speed. That caveat is exactly the reason the published studies stopped at qualification.
Where to start on Monday
Start with the second row. Counting the enquiries that were never answered takes an afternoon, needs no analysis, and in most operations turns up a number that is both higher than expected and fixable without buying anything.
Sources
Checked on 24 September 2026. These are split by how far the checking actually got, because that distinction is the point of the article.
Read in the primary document
The Short Life of Online Sales Leads — Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, Harvard Business Review, March 2011. Source of the 1.25 million leads across 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies, the seven-times and 60-times qualification figures, the definition of qualifying a lead, the 2,241-company audit, and the 42-hour average response time.
Lead Response Management Study — Dr James Oldroyd with InsideSales.com, executive summary. Source of the three years and six companies, the 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts, the 100x contact and 21x qualification figures, and the statement that the study "did not address close ratios."
Verified secondhand only
Drift lead response survey, February 2017, 433 B2B software companies. The 7% within five minutes, the 55% no response within five business days, and the live chat observation are reported consistently across multiple secondary sources. Drift's original post did not load when checked on 24 September 2026, so none of these figures has been read in the original here.
Could not be verified
"78% of buyers purchase from the vendor that responds first." No primary source found. Citations resolve to aggregator articles and to an unpublished "Lead Connect survey" with no stated methodology or date.
"Instant quotes convert 40% higher than manual replies." No source found. Previously published uncited on this site.
"Reduce your dispatch team's administrative load by 80%." No source found. Previously published uncited on this site.
A note on the two claims we removed
Both appeared on this website without citation. We went looking for their sources, could not find any, and took them down rather than leave them up. We are describing that here because an industry where every vendor quotes unsourced numbers is one where buyers cannot tell the difference between a measured claim and a made-up one, and the only way out of that is for someone to start showing their working.
