Question 1

Can I use my own domain name for my white label travel portal so customers don't see another company's name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your white label travel portal can run on your own domain name, and that is how most travel businesses set it up. You can either use your main website address, or a separate address such as a booking subdomain of the site you already have, whichever suits how you want customers to move between your brochure pages and the search and booking pages. The portal itself carries your logo, your colours and your business name, so a customer searching and booking sees only your brand from start to finish. The practical side is simple but it does need you to have access to wherever your domain name is managed, because a small setting there has to point to the portal. If you bought your domain through a web designer or a hosting company and you no longer have the login, that is usually the only thing that holds the process up, so it is worth chasing it early. Our team guides you through the change and confirms the secure padlock is in place before you start taking live bookings. There are a couple of honest limits. When a customer enters card details, the payment step may briefly show the name of the payment provider you use, because that page belongs to them and not to us. Supplier confirmations, vouchers and terms sometimes have to name the airline, hotel chain or wholesaler behind the booking, and some suppliers insist on that as a condition of selling their inventory. Which parts can be branded and which cannot depends on the suppliers and the plan you are on. Before you get in touch, decide whether you want the portal on your main address or a booking subdomain, and check that you can log in to your domain provider.

Question 2

Can my customers pay by card on my travel portal, or do I have to collect the money from them myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your customers can pay by card on the portal, as long as a payment gateway is connected to your account. The portal does not process the money itself. It passes the booking total to a gateway you hold in your own travel business name, the customer enters their card details on a secure payment page, and the funds settle into your own bank account on the gateway's normal payout schedule. You keep control of the money, and glideFares does not sit between you and your customer's payment. What this means in practice is that you need to open a gateway account first, which usually involves the gateway checking your business documents and approving you for travel sales. Which gateways can be connected depends on your plan and on which ones operate in your country, so it is worth telling us which one you are considering before you sign anything with them. Most common card types are supported through these gateways, and you can normally choose to accept full payment at the time of booking or a deposit with the balance collected later, though deposit handling depends on what the supplier allows for that particular product. You can also keep working the way you do today where it suits you. Bookings made by your staff in the back office can be marked as paid by bank transfer, cash or card machine, and some suppliers bill your agency on credit or from a deposit balance rather than taking the customer's card directly. Refunds are handled through the gateway, so the time it takes for money to reach the customer is set by them and by their bank, not by us. If you do not already have a gateway, start by asking two or three in your country what they require from a travel business and what they charge, then come back to us with the one you prefer so we can confirm it can be connected to your portal.

Question 3

Can I search hotels for a family with children and get a price that includes the kids?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. When you run a hotel search through the API you send the number of adults along with the number of children and the age of each child, and the rates that come back are priced for that whole group rather than for adults only. That means the total you quote your customer already reflects the children travelling, instead of you having to guess at a supplement later. Child ages matter because every hotel sets its own policy. Some properties let younger children stay free in the existing bedding, some charge for an extra bed or a cot, and some will only sell a family room or a larger room type once children are added. Passing the ages correctly is what tells the supplier which of those rules to apply, so a search done without them can return a price your customer will not actually be able to book. How complete that price is depends on the supplier and the property. Most will give you a full total for the room and the occupancy you asked for, but certain items such as property fees or children's meal charges are sometimes collected at the hotel and listed in the rate conditions instead of being included in the amount you pay. Some properties also simply do not load child rates, in which case they may not appear in a family search at all. When you are quoting a family, enter each child's age at the search stage rather than adding them afterwards, and read the rate conditions on the room you choose so you can tell your customer in advance about anything the hotel will collect directly at check in.

Question 4

Can I book a flight with stops in more than one city for a customer on one ticket?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can book a multi city trip as a single booking, although how far you can go with it depends on which airlines and suppliers are connected to your account. A multi city search lets you enter each leg separately, so a customer who flies out to one city, continues to a second and comes home from a third is priced as one journey instead of three unrelated bookings. Full service airlines reached through global distribution content usually handle this well, and the combined fare often works out better than buying each leg on its own. You also get one booking reference and one ticket, which makes the trip much easier for you to manage if something has to change. There are honest limits. Low cost airlines normally sell one direction at a time, so if a leg sits with one of those it has to be issued as its own separate booking with its own rules and its own baggage allowance. Mixing two carriers that have no agreement with each other can force separate tickets too, which matters because a delay on the first leg is then not the second airline's responsibility. Some suppliers also cap how many legs one search can contain, and very unusual routings may still need a manual quote. Before you promise a multi city itinerary to a customer, run a test search on your own portal using the kind of routing your clients ask for most, and check whether the result comes back as one booking reference or several, because that tells you how changes and refunds will behave later.

Question 5

Can my customers create their own account on my white label travel portal and see the trips they have booked?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a customer account area is normally part of a white label travel portal, so your travellers can sign in and look back at what they have booked with you. When someone books, the reservation is saved against the details they used, and when they log in again they can see their upcoming and past trips, the dates, the passenger or guest names and the confirmation references, and usually download or reprint their voucher without having to email your office for a copy. How much they can do from that account depends on how your portal is set up and on your plan. Showing trips and documents is simple enough. Letting a customer cancel or change a booking themselves is a different matter, because whether a booking can be amended at all comes down to the supplier and to the fare or rate rules attached to it, not to the portal. Many agencies choose to let the customer send a change request from their account and then have a staff member handle it, which keeps you in control of anything that carries a charge. It is also worth knowing that the account only reflects bookings made through your own portal under that customer's details. If your team made the booking in the back office or took it over the phone, whether it shows in the customer's account depends on it being saved against the same customer record. Where someone booked as a guest without registering, a lookup by reference and surname is usually the better route. Before you go live, decide whether you want customer logins switched on from the start and which actions you are happy for travellers to take without speaking to your staff, then raise that during setup so the right parts are enabled for your brand.

Question 6

Will my hotel booking API show me the same hotel from more than one supplier so I can pick the cheaper rate?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases, as long as your account has more than one hotel supplier connected to it. When the same property is offered by two or three sources, the search results can list each rate separately, so you and your staff can see the options side by side and sell whichever one suits your customer best. How neat this looks on screen depends on something called hotel mapping. Every supplier uses its own property codes, names and addresses for the same building, so the system has to match them up before it can group the rates together. Mapping works well for most mainstream hotels, but it is never perfect, so now and again the same property shows up as two separate entries, or a small guesthouse from one supplier is not matched to its twin from another. That is normal in this industry and not a sign that something is broken. It is also worth remembering that the cheapest line is not always the same product. Two rates for the same room can differ in board, cancellation terms, whether payment is taken by you or at the property, and whether the rate is refundable at all, so comparing only the total is risky. A few suppliers also set rules about how their rates may be shown next to others, and your plan may begin with a single supplier until you are trading steadily. The practical next step is to ask us which suppliers are live on your account, then run test searches for a city you know well and compare the room description and cancellation rules on each rate before you decide which one to quote.

Question 7

Will my white label travel portal show up on Google when someone searches for holidays in my area?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can appear in search results, but showing up well takes effort beyond simply going live. The site runs on your own domain and carries your own brand, so search engines treat it as your website rather than as part of someone else's. Your home page, your contact page and any information or destination pages you add can be found and listed in the normal way, and you can usually set your own page titles and short descriptions on the parts of the site you control. What search engines generally do not list is live availability and pricing. Those pages are built the moment a customer runs a search, and the results change by the hour, so they are not treated as fixed pages that can be saved and shown in search listings. This is true of travel websites in general, not just yours, which is why most agencies win search traffic through written content about places, trip ideas and their own services, and then let the booking engine take over once a visitor is on the site. We cannot promise a position in search results, because that depends on how much competition there is for the words you want, how old your domain is, how much useful content you publish and how well known your business already is locally. Which content pages you can add and edit yourself can also depend on your plan, so it is worth confirming that before you build a content plan around it. Ask us which pages on your portal you can edit and how to connect your own search console and analytics, then start writing a handful of pages about the destinations you actually sell.

Question 8

Will the hotel price I see through the API include all the taxes and fees, or will my customer be charged more at the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Mostly yes, the price returned by a hotel booking API includes the taxes and fees that the supplier collects from you at the time of booking, but some charges are only payable by the guest at the property and those are shown separately rather than added to the total. The reason for the split is that hotels handle money in two different ways. Room rates and the taxes tied to them are usually settled through the supplier, so they appear in the figure you quote and you can treat that as the amount your customer owes you. Local charges such as a city or tourism tax, a resort fee, a parking charge or a refundable damage deposit are collected by the hotel at check in or check out, because the supplier never touches that money. A well built API passes these through as a list of charges payable at the property, with the amount or the way it is calculated, so you can read them before you confirm anything. How complete that information is does depend on the supplier and on the property. Most of the larger hotel content feeds describe mandatory local charges clearly, but smaller independent properties sometimes give vague wording, and a tax rate set by a local authority can change at short notice. Because of that, we treat these fields as information from the supplier rather than a guarantee from us, and we show them to you exactly as they arrive instead of guessing at a total. When you are testing your hotel connection, book a property in a city that you know charges a tourism tax and check what the response tells you about charges payable at the hotel, then make sure your quote and voucher repeat that wording to the guest so there is no surprise at the desk.

Question 9

Can I use the travel agency software on my phone or tablet when I am away from the office?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. The software is used through a normal web browser rather than as a program installed on one office computer, so as long as you have an internet connection and your login details you can sign in from a laptop at home, a tablet while travelling or your phone between meetings, and you will see the same bookings and customer records your staff see at their desks. In practice, some jobs suit a small screen better than others. Looking up a booking reference, checking whether something is confirmed, viewing a customer's contact details or resending a voucher are all quick to do on a phone. Longer work such as comparing fare options, filling in full passenger details for a group or reading through a sales report is usually more comfortable on a larger screen, simply because there is more to see at once. How smooth the experience is will depend on which parts of the system you use most and how your portal has been set up, so it is worth being honest that not every screen is equally easy on a small phone. Your staff permissions work the same way on any device, so a login that cannot issue tickets in the office cannot issue them from a phone either. Because a phone is easier to lose than a desktop, it is sensible to use a screen lock and avoid saving your login on a shared or public device. The best next step is to sign in on your own phone and try the handful of tasks you most often need to do away from your desk, then tell us which screens matter most to you so we can look at how they behave on a smaller display.

Question 10

Will my hotel booking API tell me the cancellation deadline and any charges before my customer books?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in nearly every case the cancellation terms arrive with the rate itself, so you can see them before your customer pays. When your portal or your own system reads a hotel search result, each rate normally carries a policy telling you whether it can be cancelled free of charge, and if so, up to what date and time. Rates that cannot be cancelled are flagged as non refundable, and rates with a deadline will tell you what the charge becomes once that deadline has passed, which may be part of the stay or all of it depending on the hotel. The deadline is usually expressed in the hotel's local time, which matters when your customer is booking from another country, so it is worth showing the time zone next to the date. How detailed this is does depend on the supplier behind the rate. Most send a clear, structured deadline that you can display to the customer and also use for your own internal reminders, while some send the terms as plain wording that reads well to a person but is harder to handle automatically. Terms can also differ between two rates at the very same hotel, because the policy belongs to the rate your customer selected rather than to the property as a whole. For that reason it is sensible to save the exact wording at the moment of booking, so you have a record of what was agreed if there is ever a disagreement about a refund. Before you go live, run a few test searches across the different suppliers in your account and compare how the cancellation terms come back, then decide how you want them shown on your search results, your voucher and your booking confirmation.