Question 1

Do my customers have to pay the whole amount at the time of booking, or can I take a deposit and collect the rest later?

Accepted Answer

Yes, taking a deposit and collecting the balance later is possible, but it is not something you can switch on for every booking, so it is worth understanding where the limit sits. Part payment is under your control only when the money is under your control. For a holiday package you have put together yourself, or a tour you operate, you decide the deposit, the balance and the date it falls due, and your portal can show the traveller what is left to pay. Where it stops being your decision is anything you are reselling. A flight that has to be ticketed straight away has to be paid for straight away, because the airline takes the full fare from you at the moment the ticket is issued. Hotels are more mixed. Some rates are pay at the property, some are pay now and non refundable, and some allow a hold with payment later. In each of those cases the supplier sets the rule and your portal follows it rather than overriding it. There is also a cash flow point worth thinking through before you offer deposits widely. If you take a small deposit but the supplier bills you in full at booking, the difference comes out of your own working capital until the customer settles up. Many agencies handle this by offering deposits only on their own packages and on travel that is far enough out. Go through the products you actually sell most, work out which ones let you defer payment and which do not, and set your deposit rules only on the ones that genuinely allow it.

Question 2

Is the hotel price my customer sees in the search results always the price they will pay at the payment page?

Accepted Answer

No, not always, and it is worth understanding why before a customer asks you about it. Hotel rates and availability change constantly at the supplier end, and the price shown in a list of search results is a snapshot taken at the moment that search ran. By the time your customer has read the reviews, picked a room and reached the payment page, that snapshot can be several minutes old, and the supplier may have moved the rate or sold the last room at it. This is why a properly built portal checks the rate again before it takes any money. That second check goes back to the supplier, confirms the room is still there at the price quoted, and either carries the customer straight through or tells them the rate has changed. It is not a fault in the booking engine, it is the step that stops you confirming a room you cannot actually deliver. How often this happens depends a great deal on the supplier and on the market you are selling. Busy city dates and last minute stays move the most. Some suppliers hold a quoted rate for a short window, others make no such promise at all, so what you see is their behaviour rather than something that can be fixed from your side. If it is coming up often, keep a note of which supplier and which dates it happens on, and take that to the supplier concerned before assuming the portal is at fault.

Question 3

Can my customer change the travel date on a flight they have already booked through my portal?

Accepted Answer

Often yes, but not always, because it comes down to the fare rules the airline attached to that particular ticket. Many tickets allow a date change for a change fee plus any difference between the old fare and the price of the new date. The cheapest fares frequently allow no change at all, and on those the only real option is to leave the ticket unused or see what the airline offers as a credit, which is entirely the airline's decision and not ours. Where a change is allowed and the supplier passes that ability through, your team can raise it from the booking itself, see the new date priced with the fee and the fare difference included, and take that extra amount from the customer before the new ticket is issued. On some airlines and with some suppliers the change cannot be made straight away and has to go to the airline or the supplier's own service desk, so what your portal does is log the request and show you the booking as pending until an answer comes back. It is only fair to warn a customer that the rules vary by airline, by fare and sometimes by route, that low cost carriers handle changes in their own way, and that changes are normally only possible before the flight departs. Once a passenger has failed to travel, most tickets lose their value. Whether you see a change option on screen at all depends on which suppliers and airlines are enabled for your account. Before you promise anything, open the booking and read the fare conditions shown against that ticket, and if you are unsure how a particular airline behaves, ask your support contact to confirm how changes are handled for it on your setup.

Question 4

Can I let other travel agents sign up on my portal and sell through me at rates I decide for them?

Accepted Answer

Yes, that is a normal way to use a white label portal, and it is usually called running a sub agent network, though how far you can take it depends on the plan you are on and on what your suppliers permit. The idea is simple. Another agency registers on your site, you approve them, and when they log in they see the same search results your own customers see but at the rate you have set for them rather than your public selling rate. You can group agents so that one set gets a better rate than another, and you can keep your public rate untouched for walk in customers. Every booking they make sits under your account with the supplier, so the supplier still sees only you. There are limits worth knowing about before you build a network. You carry the payment risk, because the supplier will look to you when a booking has to be paid for, so most agencies either take card payment from the agent at the time of booking or give a credit limit they are comfortable losing. Some supplier contracts also restrict who may resell their rates, and a few products such as certain negotiated fares are not meant to move down a chain at all, so it is sensible to ask rather than assume. Start by writing down the rate levels you want to offer and how each agent will pay you, then check your supplier agreements for any resale wording before you invite the first agency in.

Question 5

Can my customers book more than one room in a single hotel booking on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your customers can book several rooms at once, and the booking comes back as one reservation rather than as separate ones they have to keep track of. On the search page they choose the number of rooms and who is staying in each, and the results then show only the hotels that can actually take that whole party on those dates, with a total price for the rooms together. There are limits worth knowing. Most suppliers cap how many rooms one booking may hold, and once you go past a handful of rooms the hotel usually treats it as a group booking, which sits outside the normal live rates and has to be arranged directly with the property on its own terms and its own cancellation rules. Child ages matter too, because a room that takes two adults may not take two adults and a child, and the hotel decides that, not the search. You should also expect the cancellation terms to apply to the booking as a whole. If your customer wants to drop one room out of four, some suppliers allow it and others will only cancel the entire booking and ask you to rebook what is left, which may come back at a different rate if the original one has gone. The sensible thing is to run a test search for two or three rooms in a city you sell often, take one through to the confirmation page, and read what the cancellation terms say about changing part of the booking before you promise anything to a customer.

Question 6

If a passenger's name is spelled wrong on a flight I have already ticketed, can it be corrected?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes yes, but it depends on the airline and on how big the mistake is, so please do not assume a correction will always be possible. Airlines draw a line between a small spelling slip and a change of passenger. A letter or two out of place in a first name, or a missing middle name, is often treated as a correction and many airlines will allow it, sometimes free and sometimes for a fee they set themselves. Swapping one traveller for another is a different matter and most airlines simply refuse, because the ticket is issued to a named person and is not transferable. Anything in between, such as a surname that is wrong in several places or a first name and surname entered the other way round, sits in the airline's own judgement. How the request reaches the airline also matters. A correction is not something your portal can apply on its own, because the airline holds the ticket record. The request goes to the supplier behind the flight, they raise it with the airline, and the answer comes back in the airline's own time. That can take a while, and if the departure is close there may not be enough time at all, which is why catching the error early makes a real difference. If you spot a wrong name, raise it with your flight supplier straight away rather than waiting, and check the passport spelling against the booking before you issue the ticket so the question does not come up in the first place.

Question 7

Can my portal show prices in my customers' own currency and in their own language?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label portal can normally show prices in more than one currency and text in more than one language, but how far that goes depends on your plan and on what each supplier sends back. With currency, some suppliers return a rate only in their own currency, so the portal converts it for display using a rate you control. Others allow the booking to be made in the currency you ask for. That difference matters at payment, because the amount your customer is actually charged has to be one your payment gateway and your supplier can both settle. Where a rate is converted for display only, it is fair to tell the customer the final charge may vary a little with the rate on the day. Language works differently. The wording that belongs to your portal, such as the buttons, the search labels, the emails and the vouchers, can be translated and kept as your own text. The content that comes from a supplier, such as a hotel description, a room name or a fare rule, arrives in whatever language that supplier provides, and very often that is English only. So your portal can feel local to your customer while a few supplier lines stay in English. The sensible next step is to check which currencies your payment gateway can accept and settle in, and ask your suppliers which of them can book in a currency other than their default, because those two answers decide what is realistic for you.

Question 8

Can my customers ask for things like a late arrival or a quiet room when they book a hotel?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases a customer can add a request such as a late arrival, a high floor, twin beds instead of a double or a quiet room, and it will travel with the booking to the property. The important thing to understand, and to say to your customer at the time, is that a request is not a guarantee. The hotel receives it as a note against the reservation and honours it only if it can on the day of arrival. How much you are able to send depends on the supplier the rate came from. Some suppliers accept a free text note and pass it straight through to the hotel. Others accept only a short list of standard options, such as a non smoking room or an approximate arrival time, and anything outside that list is quietly dropped without an error. So the same wording can reach one hotel in full and never reach another at all. Anything the guest genuinely must have, such as an accessible room, a cot for an infant or two rooms next to each other for a family, is safer handled by contacting the property directly once the booking is confirmed, with the confirmation reference to hand. That way you have an answer from the hotel itself rather than hoping a note was read at the right moment. When you take a request from a customer, set the expectation in the same breath that it is a request and not a promise, then check the voucher once it is issued to see whether the note has actually carried through.

Question 9

Can I sell hotels I have contracted directly myself alongside the ones that come from suppliers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software lets you load your own directly contracted properties and show them in the same search results as the hotels that arrive from your connected suppliers, though the amount of detail you can hold about your own contracts depends on your plan. In practice you set the property up once with its rooms, its board options, its photos and its description, then enter the rates and the availability you have agreed with the hotel, along with your cancellation terms and any stop sale dates. When a customer searches, your own property appears beside the supplier results and can be booked in the same basket, so your staff and your customers do not have to work in two different places. Because the contract is yours, the margin on those rooms is yours as well, and you are not adding a markup on top of somebody else's rate. The honest limit is that a direct contract makes you responsible for the parts a supplier would normally handle. Nobody else is watching the allocation, so if you forget to close out rooms you have already sold, you can oversell and have to move a guest yourself. The confirmation goes to the hotel in whatever way you have agreed with them, and payment terms, deposits and release dates are between you and the property. Loading and maintaining the rates is manual work unless the hotel can send you a rate file. Before you start, talk to one hotel you already work with, agree the rates, the release period and how they want to receive bookings, then load that single property and test a booking end to end so you know the process works before you add the rest.

Question 10

Will the confirmation emails and vouchers my customers receive carry my own logo instead of somebody else's?

Accepted Answer

Yes. On a white label portal the confirmation emails, vouchers and e-tickets that reach your customer are sent under your brand, with your logo, your business name and your contact details on them, so nothing points back to the technology behind the site. In practice this covers the whole set of documents a traveller normally receives, the booking confirmation, the hotel voucher, the flight itinerary and any cancellation notice. You supply your logo and the wording you want, and those templates are then used for every booking made through your portal. Emails are usually sent from an address on your own domain once you or your IT person add a couple of records to your domain settings, which is what makes them arrive looking like they came from you rather than from a third party. There are two honest limits. The first is that some documents are produced by the supplier and not by us, an airline e-ticket being the clearest example, so those carry the airline branding as they always would, and that is normal and expected by travellers. The second is that how far you can restyle the templates depends on your plan, since some setups allow a logo and colours while others let you rewrite the layout and the wording completely. The best next step is to send yourself a test booking, look at every email and voucher it produces, and tell us anything that still does not read the way you want.