Question 1

Can I show my customer a seat map and let them pick their seat when I book a flight through your API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, for many airlines you can, but how complete the seat map is depends on the airline and on the channel the fare comes through, so it will not be available on every flight you sell. In practice it works like this. Once your customer has chosen a flight and you have entered the passenger names, your site can call for the seat map for each leg of the journey. Where the airline shares it, you get back the cabin layout showing which seats are free, which are already taken, and which ones carry a charge. Your customer picks a seat, and the choice is added to the booking along with any fee before the ticket is issued. Low cost carriers are usually good about this because seats are a big part of what they sell. Some full service carriers only release seat maps on certain booking channels, and flights operated by a partner airline under a codeshare often return nothing at all, in which case the sensible thing is to let the booking go through without a seat and sort it out with the airline afterwards. It is also worth being clear with your customer that a seat is a request rather than a promise. A seat that looked free during the search can be gone by the time you confirm, and airlines move people around when they change aircraft type, so you can lose a seat you paid for. Paid seat charges are usually not refundable from the airline even when that happens. The best next step is to try the seat map call in the test environment on the specific airlines and routes you sell most, and decide what your booking page should show when no map comes back.

Question 2

Can your travel agency software connect to the accounting package my bookkeeper uses so I am not typing everything in twice?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it can, although how neatly it connects depends on which accounting package you use and what is included in your plan. The usual aim is that once a booking is confirmed and invoiced in the travel software, the invoice, the customer record and the payment received all land in your accounts without anyone retyping them. There are normally two ways this works. The first is a direct connection, where the two systems talk to each other and new invoices and receipts flow across on their own, usually once a day or as they happen. The second is an export, where you download your invoices, credit notes and payments for a chosen period as a file and your bookkeeper imports that file into the accounts. The direct connection is tidier, but the export route works with almost any package and is often enough for an agency that reconciles weekly or monthly. Be aware of the honest limits. Not every accounting package has a ready made link, so some setups need development work before they will talk to each other, and that is something to agree before you commit. The flow is also usually one way, from the travel software into the accounts, so anything your bookkeeper changes on their side will not come back to us. Supplier costs and refunds may need a little mapping at the start so they land in the right accounts rather than all in one place. The best next step is to tell our team exactly which accounting package you use and whether your bookkeeper works in it directly, and we will tell you plainly whether a direct connection is available or whether an export is the sensible route for you.

Question 3

Can I have my white label travel portal in more than one language for customers in other countries?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label travel portal can be offered in more than one language, but how complete the translation feels depends on where each piece of text on the page comes from. It helps to think of the pages as having two layers. The first layer is the portal's own wording, things like the search box labels, the buttons, the booking steps, the error messages and the wording in your confirmation emails and vouchers. That text sits with the portal and can be translated into the languages you want to sell in. In most cases you or your team would supply the translated wording, since you know how your customers speak and what tone you want, and we would put it in place for you. The second layer is the content that arrives from the suppliers, such as hotel descriptions, room names, fare rules, baggage wording and cancellation policies. That comes through in whatever language the supplier sends it, which is usually English. Some suppliers do offer their content in a handful of other languages and some do not offer any, so you may end up with your own wording translated and supplier text still in English on the same page. That is normal and honest to expect, rather than something we can promise away. It is also worth remembering that language and currency are separate settings, and that dates, name fields and right to left scripts are worth testing properly before you launch. The sensible next step is to tell us which languages and markets you are aiming at so we can check what the suppliers on your plan can send in those languages, then look at a test page together before you advertise to those customers.

Question 4

Can my customers search for hotels near a particular area or landmark through your hotel booking API, or only by city name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can search by area or landmark and not only by city name. A hotel search request will usually accept either a city reference or a set of map coordinates with a search radius around them, which means you can centre the search on an airport, a railway station, a beach, a hospital or a well known landmark and bring back the properties around that point. Many searches also return the distance from the point you searched, so you can sort the results by what is nearest and show that on your page. How well this works does depend on the supplier content behind the search and on the plan you are on. Some suppliers describe neighbourhoods and districts very carefully, while others only give you the city and the coordinates of each hotel, so a named district search may be reliable in big cities and patchy in smaller towns. If you want to offer your own list of landmarks, you will often need to build that list yourself from the static hotel content and store the coordinates for each place you want to sell, rather than expecting every supplier to recognise the name your customer types. It is also worth remembering that a radius search is a circle on a map, not a local person's idea of where an area begins and ends, so a wide radius can pull in hotels your customer would not really call nearby. Keeping the radius sensible and showing the distance clearly usually solves this. The next step is to run a few test searches around the areas and landmarks you sell most often, compare the results against what you already know on the ground, and ask us which search methods are available on your plan before you design your search page.

Question 5

Can I get my customer and booking data out of the software if I decide to switch to something else?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can get your own booking and customer data out of the software if you ever decide to move on. The information you put in belongs to your agency, and the system is built so you can pull it back out rather than leaving it locked away. Most agencies do this with the reporting and export tools, which let you download bookings, passenger records, customer contact details, payments and invoice records as a spreadsheet file you can open in any ordinary office program or load into another system. How much you can export in one go, and how far back your history reaches, can depend on your plan and on how much you have built up over the years. Very large exports are usually broken into batches by date range so they complete properly. If you want one full copy of everything, including saved documents such as vouchers and invoice copies, it is better to ask our support team to prepare it for you than to try to do it yourself in a single click. There is one honest limit worth knowing about. Content that comes from a supplier, such as hotel descriptions, photos, fare rules and live availability, is not yours to carry away, so an export covers your own records rather than the supplier catalogues sitting behind the search. Your bookings will still carry the supplier reference numbers, which is the important part if you need to chase a refund, a change or a cancellation later on. If this matters to you, run a small test export now while everything is calm, check that the fields you actually rely on are all there, and ask our team what a full copy would involve so you know the answer before you need it.

Question 6

Can I hold a seat on a flight for my customer for a day or two without paying for it through your API?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes yes, but it depends entirely on the airline and the fare you have selected. Many full service carriers allow you to create a booking and hold the seats until a ticketing deadline, and where that is possible the API returns the booking along with its deadline so your staff can see exactly how long they have to collect payment. Low cost carriers almost always need payment at the moment of booking, so there is no hold option on those fares at all. Where a hold is allowed, the length varies by airline, route and fare type. Some airlines give you only until a set time on the same day, others allow a day or longer. That deadline is set by the airline, not by us, and it is often shorter during busy travel periods or when departure is close. The held fare is not always protected either, so if the airline withdraws that fare before you issue the ticket, you may have to reprice before you can complete the booking. If the deadline passes without payment, the airline usually cancels the booking by itself, which is why the software can display these deadlines alongside your bookings so nothing quietly disappears. Whether you see hold options in the first place also depends on which supplier connections are enabled on your plan, as some content only supports instant ticketing. Before you promise a customer a hold, check with us which of your connections support it, and always read the ticketing deadline returned on that specific booking rather than relying on what the airline normally allows.

Question 7

Can I stop certain hotels from showing up in my search results if I don't want to sell them?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can keep chosen hotels out of your results. Agencies ask for this all the time, usually because a property has caused problems for their customers, or because they already have a direct contract with that hotel and do not want it appearing at a different rate on their own site. The normal way it works is an exclusion list that sits between the supplier results and your pages, so when a search comes back, anything on your list is taken out before your customer ever sees it. Filtering can usually be set up in more than one way. You can block a single property, or hide a particular supplier's rooms in one city while still using that supplier elsewhere, or screen out whole groups of hotels by rating if you only want to sell the better end of the market. The reverse is also possible, so if you would rather show only a short, chosen list of hotels in a destination, that can be arranged instead of a blocklist. There are honest limits. We can only remove what has already arrived, so a very long exclusion list in a small destination will leave you with thin results. The same hotel can also come back from different suppliers under slightly different names and spellings, so blocking by name alone is not safe and the property needs to be matched properly. How much of this you control yourself depends on your plan and on whether your team works with the API directly or uses a portal we set up for you. The best next step is to write down the hotels you want excluded with their city and street address, then ask us how those properties are identified in your setup and run a test search in that city to confirm they are gone.

Question 8

Can the software produce proper invoices with my agency details on them that my corporate clients will accept?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the software can generate an invoice for a booking with your own agency details on it, including your logo, your trading name, your address and your tax registration number where that applies. Once you have set those details up in your account, they carry across to every invoice automatically, so your staff are not rebuilding the same document in a word processor each time. You can usually issue the invoice against a company rather than the traveller, which is what most corporate clients need, and send or download it as a PDF. What the invoice can show depends partly on how you work. Things like a cost centre, a purchase order reference, an employee number or a project code can normally be captured at booking time and printed on the invoice, but the exact fields available, and how much of the layout you can change yourself, vary with your plan. If your client has a strict template of their own, it is worth sending us a sample early so we can tell you honestly what we can match and what we cannot. One limit to be clear about. This is booking and invoicing, not a full accounting system. Tax treatment of travel differs from country to country, and whether your invoice satisfies your local rules is something your accountant has to confirm, not something we can promise on your behalf. The best next step is to raise one test booking, issue an invoice from it, and show that document to your accountant and to your largest corporate client before you roll it out across the office.

Question 9

Can I try out your flight booking API with test bookings before I start selling real tickets?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in nearly all cases you can. We give you test credentials that point your site at a test environment, where a search, a booking and a cancellation all run from start to finish without a real ticket being issued and without any money moving. This lets your developer check that your site handles the responses properly, and it lets you and your staff click through the booking screens the way a customer would, so you find the awkward bits before a paying customer does. The main thing to expect is that test results are not real market data. Many test environments only return flights for a small set of sample routes and dates, so the times, airlines and fares you see may look thin or strange. That is normal and not a sign of a problem. What matters in testing is the behaviour, so work through a search, a successful booking, a cancellation, and deliberately broken cases like a wrong date or an incomplete passenger name, and see that your site shows a sensible message each time. Where it gets less tidy depends on the supplier and the airline. Some content has no test environment at all, so the only way to prove it is a live booking that you void or cancel straight away, which can carry an airline charge. Extras such as seats, bags and special requests often do not respond properly in test even though they work live. Some suppliers also ask you to pass a short review of your booking flow before they hand over live credentials, so allow time for that. Before you begin, write down the handful of real scenarios your agents deal with every week and ask us which of those can be tested fully and which will only behave correctly once you are live.

Question 10

Can I change the dates on a hotel booking after it has already been confirmed, or do I have to cancel and book again?

Accepted Answer

Usually no, not as a direct change. Most hotel suppliers treat a confirmed booking as fixed, so moving the dates means cancelling the original booking and making a new one at whatever rate is available on the day you rebook. Some suppliers do allow a date change or a guest name change through the API, but it is not something we can promise across the board, because it depends entirely on the supplier sitting behind that particular rate. The practical thing to look at is the cancellation policy that came back with the rate you booked. If the booking is still inside its free cancellation window, cancelling and rebooking costs your customer nothing beyond any difference in the new rate, and it is the cleanest way to move dates. If the rate was non refundable, or the free cancellation date has already passed, a cancellation will normally attract a charge, and it is worth asking us to check with the supplier before you cancel, though nothing is guaranteed. Where a supplier does support amendments, the API will take the new dates and come back either with a confirmation or with a message explaining why it was refused, for example because the hotel has no rooms left on those nights. The booking record is then updated so your staff and your customer are looking at the same information. Before you promise a customer flexible dates, check the cancellation terms shown on the rate at the time of booking and keep a copy with the booking, so you know exactly where you stand if they later ask to move the trip.