Question 1

Will my flight booking API tell me if the airline changes a flight time after my customer has booked?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can see a flight time change through your flight booking API, but how quickly you learn about it and how clearly it is flagged depends on the airline and on the supplier the booking was made with. The way it normally works is that your API has a retrieve booking request that returns the current itinerary as the airline holds it right now. If the airline has moved a departure, changed an aircraft or cancelled a leg, those new details come back in that response, and you can compare them against what you originally sold. Some suppliers go further and send change messages or notifications into your account so the booking is brought to your attention without you having to look. Others are quieter and expect you to check the booking yourself, which is why many agencies build a habit of re-checking anything departing in the next few days. Be aware of the limits here. Very small time shifts are sometimes not announced at all, while cancellations and big changes almost always come through properly. Low cost carriers often write straight to the passenger, so your customer may hear before you do if the contact details on the booking are theirs rather than yours. Whether you can accept the new times, move the passenger to another flight or request a refund through the API, instead of contacting the airline, also varies by carrier and by what your plan includes. The useful next step is to ask us which of your connected airlines and suppliers actually push change notifications, so you know which bookings need manual checking and which will tell you on their own.

Question 2

Will my hotel booking API tell me what time guests can check in and check out?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it will. Check in and check out times are part of the property information that comes through with the hotel content, so when your customer looks at a hotel on your portal you can show the earliest time they can collect their keys and the time they need to be out of the room on the final morning. This information is also usually carried through into the booking confirmation, which saves you answering the same question by phone or message later. How complete it is does depend on the supplier behind the property. Larger chain hotels and properties loaded by the bigger suppliers almost always publish clear times, while small guesthouses and apartments sometimes leave the field blank or give only a general note such as reception hours. Apartments and self check in properties often have key collection instructions instead of a standard desk time, and those notes may arrive as free text rather than as a tidy time you can display in a neat box. It is also worth remembering that these are the standard times, not a promise for a particular guest. Early check in and late check out are decided by the hotel on the day and usually depend on whether the room is free, so they are a request rather than something your API can confirm in advance. If your customer has a very early flight arrival or a late departure, you can send that through as a guest note with the booking, but the hotel is the one that agrees to it. When you set up your hotel search, check how the times appear for a few different property types on your own account, including an apartment, so you know what your customers will actually see before they book.

Question 3

Can I send my customer a few trip options in one quote before they decide what to book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually put several options into a single quote and send it to your customer before anything is actually booked. The idea is that you search as normal, then instead of pushing straight through to payment, you save the results you like into a proposal. Your customer sees the choices side by side and comes back to you with the one they want. In practice you would search flights, hotels or packages, pick out the results worth showing, and add them to a quote along with your own notes. You can set your own markup on each option, write a short description in your own words, and send the whole thing out carrying your agency name and logo rather than ours. Most agencies send it as a link the customer can open on a phone, and some prefer a document they can attach to their own email. The honest limit is that a quote is not a reservation. The fares and room rates you capture are live supplier prices, so by the time your customer replies a day or two later, the price or the availability may have moved, and the system will need to check again before the booking goes through. Holding an option properly depends on whether the supplier allows a hold at all, and that varies by airline and by hotel. Whether the quoting tools are switched on for you also depends on the plan you are on and how your portal has been configured. It is worth asking us to confirm what is enabled on your account, then trying it once with a real enquiry so you can see how the quote looks to your customer before you rely on it.

Question 4

Can I add my customer's frequent flyer number to a flight booking through my API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can add a frequent flyer number when you make a flight booking, but whether the airline actually accepts it and credits the miles depends on the airline and on the supplier the fare comes from. In the passenger details part of the booking, alongside the name and date of birth, there is normally a place to choose the airline loyalty programme and type in the membership number. That detail is passed through with the rest of the booking and sits on the airline record, so the airline can match it to the member's account. You can usually add a number for each traveller on the booking, not just the lead passenger. There are real limits worth knowing. Airlines check the number against their own member records, so if the name on the ticket does not match the name on the loyalty account, the number is often ignored without any error being shown to you. Some low cost carriers run their own schemes that work differently, and certain negotiated or consolidator fares either will not take a loyalty number or will take it and earn nothing. Earning rules, tier credit and benefits such as extra baggage or priority boarding are decided entirely by the airline, so we cannot tell you in advance how much will be credited or whether a perk will be honoured at the airport. It is worth checking in your own portal whether the loyalty field appears for the airlines you sell most often, and telling your customers to keep their ticket number and boarding pass so they can claim any missing miles directly with the airline later.

Question 5

I already have a website for my travel agency, can the white label portal be added to it instead of replacing it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the portal can sit alongside the website you already have rather than replace it. The usual approach is to keep your current site as your main brand page and send the booking part to the portal, either on a subdomain of your own domain or on a booking page you link to from your menu. To your customers it still feels like one business, because the portal carries your logo, your colours and your own contact details. The other option is to put a search box straight onto your existing pages, so a customer enters the city and dates where they already are and only moves across to the portal once they see results. Whether that is possible depends on what your current website is built on and who looks after it, because a small piece of code has to be added to your pages. Some website builders and locked down templates do not allow that, so it is worth checking with whoever manages your site before you settle on this route. What you should not expect is for the portal to redesign your existing website or to absorb the pages you already have. They remain two things joined together, and how closely the look and feel match comes down to how much styling work is included in your plan. Anything beyond the standard branding, such as matching fonts and layouts very precisely, is usually treated as extra design work and should be agreed before anyone starts. Before you decide, find out who controls your domain name and who can edit your current website, then share your website address with us so we can tell you which of these options will actually work on it.

Question 6

Will my hotel booking API show me whether breakfast is included in the room rate?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the meal plan is part of the room information that comes back with each rate, so you can see before booking whether a room is room only or includes breakfast or a fuller board arrangement. The booking portal reads that information from the supplier along with the room name, the price and the cancellation terms, so your agent or your customer sees it on the same results screen rather than having to call the hotel to ask. How clearly it appears depends on the supplier behind that particular hotel. Some suppliers send the meal plan as a proper field, which we can show as a neat label on your search results and on the booking confirmation. Others bundle it into the free text rate description, which means it reads more like a sentence than a tidy tag. We display whatever the supplier gives us, and we do not invent or assume a meal plan when the supplier has not stated one. There are a few limits worth knowing. Breakfast is sometimes included only for the guests named on the booking, so extra occupants may have to pay at the property. Children are often treated differently from adults, and some hotels include breakfast on one rate type and not on another for the same room. The rate conditions text is the reliable place to check, and that text is always shown before the booking is confirmed. The best next step is to run a few test searches on the properties your customers book most often, see how the meal plan reads for each one, and tell our support team if you would like it shown more prominently in your results and your confirmation documents.

Question 7

Can I give each of my staff their own login to the software and control what they are allowed to see?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can create a separate login for every member of your team rather than sharing one set of details, and you can decide what each person is allowed to do once they are inside. This is the safer way to work, because a shared login means you can never tell who made a change, and it also means you have to change the password for everybody whenever one person leaves. The usual approach is to group your staff by the kind of work they do. A booking consultant might only be able to search, quote and make bookings. A supervisor might also be able to cancel, amend or process a refund. Someone in accounts might only need to open reports and payment records without touching live bookings at all. You can normally also hide things you would rather your team did not see, such as your supplier cost or the markup you are adding, so they only work with the selling figure in front of the customer. How finely you can slice these permissions depends on your plan and on which parts of the system you are using, so it is worth being honest with yourself about what you actually need before you assume it is available. Actions that involve a supplier are also still bound by the supplier's own rules, so giving a staff member permission to cancel does not change what the airline or the hotel will allow. Before your portal is set up, write down the roles in your agency and what each one should and should not be able to reach, then ask us to confirm which of those controls your plan covers.

Question 8

How long does it usually take to get my white label travel portal live and taking bookings?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label travel portal can usually go live fairly quickly, though the exact timeline depends on how much you want changed and how fast the supplier side moves. The portal software itself is already built and tested, so you are not waiting on development from scratch. What takes the time is the setup around it, which is mostly your branding, your domain, your payment arrangement and the supplier connections you want switched on. The parts that are within our control tend to move the fastest. Applying your logo, your colours, your company details and pointing your own web address at the portal are routine tasks and do not usually hold things up. If you want a heavily customised look, extra pages, or a booking flow that differs from the standard one, that naturally adds time, and we will tell you honestly what that means before you commit. The part we cannot promise on is the supplier and payment side. If you are using your own airline, hotel or consolidator contracts, you need credentials from each of those suppliers, and some of them take their own time to approve a new agency and issue access. The same applies to a payment gateway, where the provider may ask for business documents and run their own checks. We can only connect what you have been given access to, so these steps often decide the real go live date rather than anything on our end. The most useful thing you can do is start your supplier and payment gateway applications as early as possible, then talk to us about how much customisation you actually want so we can give you a realistic date for your own setup.

Question 9

Will my flight booking API show me low cost airlines as well as the regular ones?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your flight searches can return low cost carriers alongside the traditional airlines, but how many of them you actually see depends on the suppliers connected to your account and the plan you are on. Flight content normally reaches you through more than one kind of connection. Traditional airlines are usually distributed through the large global distribution systems, while many budget airlines are reached through direct connections to the airline itself. When both are switched on for your account, the results can be shown together in one list so your customer compares them side by side without knowing where each fare came from. We cannot promise every budget airline in every market, because some of them do not distribute to agents at all, and others only work in certain regions. It also helps to know that low cost fares behave differently once booked. They are often paid in full at the time of booking, they are frequently non refundable, and bags, seats and meals are usually sold as separate extras rather than being included. Name corrections and date changes can be limited or carry a fee set by the airline, and holding a seat without payment is often not possible. None of that is something we decide, it comes from the airline's own rules, so the terms you see at the time of search are the ones that apply. The next thing to do is tell us the routes and regions that matter most to your business, so we can confirm which carriers are live for you, and then run a few test searches on your busiest routes to see the results for yourself.

Question 10

Will my hotel booking API have properties in smaller towns, or will I only find hotels in the big cities?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you will usually find properties in smaller towns as well as big cities, but how much choice comes back varies a lot by destination and by which suppliers are connected to your account. A hotel booking API does not hold rooms of its own. It passes your customer's search to the hotel suppliers connected behind it and shows you whatever those suppliers have loaded for that town on those dates. Large cities and popular resort areas tend to return plenty of options because many suppliers compete for the same properties. In a small town, a rural area or a place that mainly receives domestic travellers, the list can be short, and what you see may be guesthouses, serviced apartments or independent hotels rather than the chain names your customers already know. If a particular town matters to your business, there are two normal fixes. One is to add another supplier connection, since different suppliers are stronger in different regions. The other is to load your own directly contracted properties alongside the live API inventory, so you always have something to sell in the places you specialise in. How many connections you can run, and which ones are available to you, can depend on your plan and on the supplier agreements involved, so please treat that as something to confirm with us rather than assume. Before you go live, write down the destinations you sell most often and run a test search on each one for dates a few months ahead, then tell us where the results look thin so we can suggest which connection would fill the gap.