Question 1

When I search for flights on my portal, will I see all the airlines or only some of them?

Accepted Answer

You will see the airlines that our flight search connects to, which includes most major carriers and many regional ones, but not necessarily every single airline in the world. The exact airlines available depend on which suppliers we work with and what they can access. Some very small regional airlines or carriers that do not use standard booking systems may not show up in the search results, even though they operate flights in that market. When you first set up your portal, you should search for some common routes you know well and check whether the airlines you expect to see are showing up. This gives you a realistic picture of what your customers will find. You can also talk to our team about which airlines matter most for your business, and we can let you know whether those specific carriers are available through our platform. Keep in mind that what shows up can sometimes depend on how far ahead your customer is booking and what route they are searching. Some airlines have agreements that limit where their flights can be sold, so availability can vary. The best way to know for certain is to do some test searches yourself on your portal before you launch it to your real customers, so you can see exactly what they will see and decide if it matches what you need.

Question 2

Can I save a quote for a customer who is still deciding and send it to them so they can book it later?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most set ups you can build a quote, save it against the customer, and send it to them as a link or a document they can open later. You can usually put two or three options side by side, add your own notes about what is included, and have your own markup already built into what the customer sees, so the quote looks like a proper offer from your agency rather than a raw search result. The honest limit is that a saved quote is not a held price. Flight and hotel rates are live and come from the supplier at the moment of searching, so when your customer opens the quote later the system checks again and the price may have moved or the option may have sold out. That is not a fault in the software, it is how the airline and hotel systems work. Some airlines do allow a short ticketing time limit or a hold on a fare, and some hotel rates are more stable than others, but this varies by supplier and by fare type, so it cannot be promised across the board. Whether the customer can turn the quote into a booking themselves in one go, or whether someone on your team has to reprice and rebook it, depends on the suppliers you are connected to and on the plan you are on. Many agencies also like to see which quotes turned into bookings and which went quiet, so they know who to chase. It is worth checking with us which of your connected suppliers allow a hold on a fare, and how long your quote links stay live, then agreeing a simple follow up rule with your staff so quotes do not go stale.

Question 3

Can I put my own logo and colours on the portal so it looks like my own website and not a template?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. That is the main idea behind a white label portal. The search, booking and payment pages sit under your own web address, with your logo at the top, your brand colours, your company name and your own contact details, so a customer who lands there sees your business and not the name of the company that built the software. In most cases you can change the logo, the small icon that shows in the browser tab, the main colour scheme, the banner images on the home page, the footer text and links, and your own terms and conditions and privacy pages. You can usually also set which products show first, so if you mainly sell hotels you can lead with hotels rather than flights. Be aware that some parts are harder to move around. The way search results are laid out and the order of the checkout steps are often kept as they are, because they have to match the information the suppliers send back and they are tested to make sure bookings go through cleanly. How far you can go beyond logo and colours can depend on your plan, and a completely custom design drawn from scratch is normally treated as separate design work rather than something included by default. The practical next step is to get your logo ready as a clear, high resolution file along with the colour codes your brand already uses, then ask us to apply them and check the result on a phone as well as a laptop before you share the link. If you have a specific look in mind, show us an example site first so we can tell you honestly what is included and what would need extra design work.

Question 4

Do the hotel photos and descriptions come through automatically on my portal, or do I have to add them for every hotel myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in almost every case the photos, descriptions, facilities and star ratings come through automatically along with the rooms and prices, so you do not have to build a hotel library by hand. The way it works is that a hotel supplier sends two kinds of information. One is the live part, meaning what rooms are free on your customer's dates and what they cost. The other is the standing information about the property itself, such as the address, the star rating, the room names, the facility list and the image gallery. Your portal keeps that standing information and shows it on the hotel page, which is why a property can appear on your site with a full write up and a set of photos without anyone on your team touching it. Being honest about the limits, the quality of this content varies a great deal from one supplier to another and from one property to another. Big city chain hotels usually come with plenty of large images and a detailed description, while small guest houses can arrive with one poor photo and two lines of text. Descriptions are often only in English, and the same hotel coming from two different suppliers can carry different wording and different pictures, so what your customer sees depends on which source the room was taken from. Where you hold your own direct deals, you can normally upload your own images and write your own description instead. It is worth opening a handful of properties in your best selling destinations on your own portal and comparing them with the hotel's own website, then telling your support contact about any pages that look thin so they can check what content options your plan allows.

Question 5

Can I get a monthly sales report out of the software so I can see which of my staff and which destinations are bringing in the most business?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can, and most of it comes straight out of the booking records your portal is already keeping. Every booking saved on the system carries the date it was made, the login that made it, the travel dates, the destination, the supplier it came from and the amount, so a report is really just a filtered view of that list. You can normally narrow it down by a date range, by staff or sub agent login, by product type such as flights or hotels, and by destination, then export what you get to a spreadsheet if you want to work on it further. How deep the reporting goes depends on your plan and on what the suppliers send back. Booking counts and sales totals are simple enough. Profit per booking is only as good as the cost information sitting in the system, so if your markups and net rates are loaded properly the margin column will be reliable, and if they are not it will only show you the selling side. Commission that a supplier pays you afterwards is often not visible until their own statement arrives, so that part usually has to be matched by hand at month end. Two things are worth watching. Cancellations and refunds can make a month look stronger than it really was if you only read the gross sales line, so check that your report shows them separately. Also check whether bookings are counted by the date they were booked or the date of travel, because those two views give very different answers and it is easy to compare the wrong one month to month. The best next step is to ask us to open the reports on your plan with your own bookings in front of you, and tell us which totals you look at when you close the month so we can confirm they are all there before you start relying on them.

Question 6

Can I see the airline's own booking reference for a flight sold on my portal so I can check it on the airline's website?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will see an airline booking reference for a flight sold through your portal, and you can usually use it to look the trip up on the airline's own site. When the booking is confirmed, the supplier sends back a reference, and once the ticket is issued the ticket number comes back too. Both normally appear on the booking details screen in your admin area and on the confirmation your customer receives, so you have them without having to ask anyone. Whether that reference works on the airline's website depends on the airline and on where the fare came from. For most scheduled airlines booked through a normal flight connection, the reference is the same one the airline recognises, so you or your customer can enter it with the surname and then check in, pick a seat or see the latest schedule. With some consolidated or aggregated content you may only get the supplier's own reference at first, with the airline one appearing after ticketing, and sometimes not at all. A number of low cost airlines keep the booking inside their own system, so the reference is only useful on their site. One honest word of warning. Even when you can see the booking on the airline's website, making changes there directly is risky, because the supplier record your portal relies on will not know about them. That mismatch is what causes problems later with refunds, date changes and extra bags. Treat the airline site as somewhere to look, not somewhere to act, and send any change through your portal or your supplier so everything stays in step. Open a recent flight booking in your admin area and see which references are stored against it, then ask each of your flight suppliers whether they allow you to contact the airline directly for servicing.

Question 7

Can I make test bookings on my portal first to check everything works before I let real customers on it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in almost every case you can test your portal before you open it to the public. A new white label portal is usually set up in a test mode first, where searches and bookings run against the supplier test systems rather than their live ones. That means you can walk through a whole booking from search to confirmation without anything really being ticketed and without any money moving. How realistic that test feels does depend on the supplier and on what is included in your plan. Some suppliers give a proper test environment that behaves much like the live one. Others give test data that is made up or out of date, so you may see strange availability or odd results that would never appear once you are live. And a few suppliers do not offer a test environment at all, so the only honest way to check them is a small real booking that you cancel yourself afterwards, which can mean a cancellation or ticketing cost depending on the fare rules. When you do test, try to cover the whole journey rather than just a search. Check that your markup is applied the way you expect, that the payment page works with your own payment setup, that the confirmation email and the voucher carry your company name, that a customer can log in and see the booking, and that you can cancel or amend it from your agent side. Mistakes nearly always show up at those later steps, not in the search. Before you go live, ask which of the suppliers on your plan have a working test environment and which ones will need a real booking to prove, then write a short list of the scenarios you want to see pass and keep it until every one of them is signed off.

Question 8

Can I give my sub agents their own login so they can book themselves and I control how much credit they get?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this is one of the most common ways travel agency software is used, and it is usually set up as an agent network sitting underneath your own account. Each sub agent gets their own username and password, logs in to a portal that carries your branding, searches and books on their own, and sees only their own bookings. They do not see what your other agents are booking, and they do not see the fares you buy at or the margin you are making on top. On the money side, most systems let you work in one of two ways. You can give an agent a credit limit, so every booking they make is deducted from that limit and new bookings stop once it is used up, or you can ask them to top up a deposit balance in advance and let them book against it. You can normally also set a different markup for different agents or agent groups, so your bigger producers see sharper fares than a brand new agent does. Whether both the credit option and the deposit option are available to you, and how much of it you can change yourself, depends on your plan and on how your portal has been configured. Be aware that credit control only works as well as the housekeeping behind it. Cancellations, refunds and supplier penalties do not always flow back into an agent's balance on their own, because that depends on what the supplier confirms and when, so you may need to adjust some balances by hand and keep an eye on the agent statements. The next thing to do is check whether agent logins with credit limits and statements are included in your current plan, then start with a couple of agents you already trust on modest limits before you open it up more widely.

Question 9

Can I run a discount code on my portal for a sale without dropping my prices for everyone?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can set up a discount code that only works for the customers you give it to, so your normal prices stay exactly as they are for everybody else. The code is usually typed in on the payment page, the portal checks that it is still valid, and then it reduces the amount the customer is charged before they pay. The thing to understand before you launch a sale is where the discount actually comes from. The supplier still has to be paid the fare or room rate they quoted, so the discount comes out of your own markup, not out of their price. That means you need to know what your margin is on the kind of booking you are promoting, and set the code so it never cuts deeper than that margin. Otherwise you can end up selling below cost without noticing until you reconcile. Most portals also let you put conditions on a code, such as the dates it is valid for, whether it applies to flights or hotels or both, a minimum booking value, a limit on how many times it can be used in total, or one use per customer. Exactly which of these controls you get depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up, so please do not assume all of them are available. It is also worth deciding in advance how refunds work on a discounted booking, because the customer should normally be refunded what they actually paid rather than the original price. Before you advertise anything, ask your account contact which of these controls your plan includes, then create one code and put a test booking through yourself to confirm the final amount charged is what you expected.

Question 10

Can I correct a spelling mistake in a passenger's name after the ticket has already been issued?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes yes, but it depends on the airline rather than on your portal. Many airlines allow a small correction of a letter or two where it is clearly a typing error and the passenger is plainly the same person. Others treat any change to a name as a different passenger altogether, which means the ticket has to be cancelled and a new one issued. Your portal can send the request, but it cannot overrule the airline's own rule. The single biggest factor is how quickly you spot it. Most airlines allow a ticket to be voided within a short window after issue, usually the same day, and if you are inside that window you can void and rebook with the correct name at no loss. Once that window closes, you are into a reissue, which can carry an airline fee and a fare difference if the original fare is no longer available. Low cost carriers work differently again and often treat a name change as a chargeable service rather than a correction. How it works in practice also depends on the supplier connection behind your flight search. Some suppliers let a correction be requested straight from the booking record in your portal, while others need it raised with their support team because airlines do not all allow name changes to be made automatically. Either way you will see the booking and its status in your own system, so you are not chasing it blind. The practical habit is to read the passenger names on the confirmation against the passport the moment the ticket is issued, and if anything is wrong, raise it the same day while the void option is still open.