Question 1

Is there anything I can do to make hotel searches load faster on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, some of it can be improved, though part of the waiting time will always be outside your control. When a customer searches a city, your portal has to ask every hotel supplier you are connected to for live rooms and rates, wait for each one to reply, then match the same property arriving from two or three suppliers so it does not appear more than once in the list. A popular city can return a very large amount of information at once, which is why a hotel search usually feels slower than a flight search. There are a few practical ways to cut the wait. Keep only the suppliers you actually sell from switched on, because every extra connection adds another reply to wait for. If a supplier is weak in a particular country, it can often be left out of searches for that region. Hotel names, photos and descriptions can be held and served from your own portal rather than requested fresh each time, so only the live prices and availability need to be fetched. Results can also be shown as they arrive instead of holding everything back until the slowest supplier answers. What cannot be promised is a fixed speed, because the biggest factor is how quickly each supplier's own system responds, and that varies by time of day and by how busy they are. Your portal can only wait so long before it moves on, so a very slow supplier may be left out of that particular search. Which suppliers you have, and how many connections your plan allows, also affect the result. Time a few searches in the cities you sell most and note which suppliers are consistently slow to answer, then share that with your support contact so the setup can be tuned around them.

Question 2

If my customer cancels their flight, can I do the refund from my portal myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can start a flight cancellation and refund request from inside your portal, but what actually happens next is decided by the airline and the fare rules, not by the software. Your booking screen will normally give you a cancel option on the ticket, and that sends the request through to the supplier or airline system the ticket was issued on. The portal keeps a record of the request and updates the booking status so you and your staff can see where it stands. What you get back depends entirely on the ticket your customer bought. Some fares are fully refundable, some refund only the taxes, and some are not refundable at all. Low cost airlines in particular often allow no refund once the ticket is issued. The portal shows you the rules that came with the fare at the time of booking, so it is worth saving or checking those before you promise anything to the customer. Timing is the part nobody can guarantee. The airline has to assess the refund, the supplier then has to pass it back, and if your customer paid by card it has to travel back through the payment provider as well. Some refunds come through quickly and others sit for a long while. Certain airlines and certain fare types also still need a manual request handled by the supplier rather than an instant automatic cancellation, and your plan and the connections you use will affect which ones are automatic. Before you cancel anything, open the booking in your portal, read the fare rules attached to it, and tell your customer clearly what is refundable and that the money comes back on the airline's timetable rather than yours.

Question 3

Can I see all my flight, hotel and transfer bookings in one place instead of logging into each supplier's website?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Any booking that is made through your portal lands in a single booking list in your back office, whether it is a flight, a hotel, a transfer or a tour, so you do not have to open each supplier site one by one to see what you have sold. In that list you would normally see your own booking reference, the passenger or guest names, the travel dates, the supplier's reference, the current status, what the customer paid and what your markup was, and whether the booking came from your website, from one of your staff or from a sub agent. You can usually search and filter it by travel date, booking date, status or the person who made the booking, which is what most agencies use at the end of the month to check their sales. There are honest limits worth knowing. Anything you book outside the portal, for example directly on a supplier's own extranet or on the phone with an airline, will not show up there unless you enter it yourself as an offline booking. Status updates also depend on the supplier. Some send live updates as soon as something changes at their end, others only update when the booking is refreshed, so for a hotel that is still on request the supplier's own record remains the final word. Which fields you see and which reports you can pull out can also depend on your plan and on which suppliers are connected to your account. The next thing to do is list the suppliers you use today, ask which of them can be connected so their bookings flow into the list automatically, and agree how you will record the rest by hand so your reporting stays complete.

Question 4

What happens if my customer wants to change the dates on a hotel booking after it is already confirmed?

Accepted Answer

Usually no, not as a straight edit to the existing booking. Most hotel suppliers do not let you swap the check in and check out dates on a confirmed reservation, because the room, the rate and the availability are all tied together at the moment of booking. The normal route is to cancel the original booking and make a new one for the new dates, and your portal is built to let you do both from the booking record. Whether that costs your customer anything depends entirely on the rate they booked. If it was a refundable rate and you are still inside the free cancellation window, you cancel at no charge and rebook. If it was a non refundable rate, the supplier will usually keep the money even though your customer is only moving the dates, so you need to check the cancellation terms on the booking before you tell the customer anything. The new dates are also priced at whatever is available today, which can be higher or lower than what they first paid. A few suppliers do allow some changes to be sent through, and some will accept a date change as a request rather than an instant action. That varies from supplier to supplier and is not something your portal can force, so the honest answer is that it has to be checked case by case with the supplier holding the booking. Before you promise a customer anything, open the booking in your portal and read the cancellation terms on that specific rate, then confirm with your supplier whether they will take a change request for it.

Question 5

Can I run two different travel brands on separate websites from the same booking software?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can run more than one brand from the same booking software, each on its own web address with its own logo, colours and homepage. This is a common setup for agents who sell leisure holidays under one name and corporate travel under another, or who want a separate brand for a different country or market. Each site looks like a completely independent company to the customer, and nothing on the public pages tells them the two are related. Behind the scenes you would usually manage them from one login, with the bookings from each brand kept separate so you can see how each one is performing on its own. You can normally set different markups, different payment methods and different content for each brand, because what sells well to a corporate client is rarely what sells well to a family booking a holiday. What you cannot always do is treat them as two legally separate businesses. If both brands draw on the same supplier agreements, the supplier may still see a single agency behind them. There are a few honest limits worth knowing. Some suppliers and airlines want their own credentials or their own approval for each brand name you trade under, so you may need to ask them before a second brand goes live. The number of brands you can run, and whether a second one is included or charged separately, depends on your plan. Some suppliers also restrict which markets or currencies you can sell in, so a brand aimed at another country may need its own arrangement. The best next step is to tell us how many brands you have in mind and which markets they will sell to, so we can check your supplier agreements and your plan before you commit to the second name.

Question 6

Why does the same hotel sometimes show up twice in my search results with two different prices?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this happens often, and in most cases it is not a fault. When your portal is connected to more than one hotel supplier, the same property can arrive twice because each supplier keeps its own name, spelling and address for it. The portal tries to match those records together, comparing names, addresses and map locations. If one supplier sends a shortened name, or writes the address in a different way, the match can be missed and the hotel appears as two separate entries. Sometimes both entries are genuinely correct and should stay. The same hotel can come from two sources on different terms, so one line may include breakfast, or be non refundable, while the other is a flexible room only rate. That means the cheaper line is not always the same product, and it is worth opening both before you quote a customer, so you can compare the board basis and the cancellation terms rather than just the amount. We can reduce the duplicates over time. Matching rules are reviewed and improved, and properties you report can be joined so one hotel appears once with its rates listed underneath. Being honest, it will never be perfect, because it depends on the quality of the information each supplier sends, and small guesthouses, apartments and newly opened hotels are the hardest to match. How often you see it also depends on how many suppliers are switched on for your plan, since a single supplier produces very few duplicates. Next time you spot one, note the hotel name, the city and the dates you searched, and send those examples to our support team so the records can be joined for everyone on your portal.

Question 7

Can I connect flight search to the website I already have instead of starting a new portal from scratch?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can connect flight search and booking to a website you already own rather than starting again with a brand new portal. That is one of the main reasons a flight booking API exists. The API passes searches, fares, fare rules, bookings and ticketing between your site and the flight suppliers, and you decide how all of it is laid out on your own pages. The honest part is that an API is not a finished website. It returns flight data, not ready made search boxes, results pages or checkout screens, so you need someone technical to build those pages and to keep them working as airline and supplier rules change over time. If you do not have a developer, the usual middle route is to keep your existing site for your brand, content and enquiries, and send the booking section to ready built pages that carry your own logo, colours and web address. Customers move between the two without really noticing, and you avoid a long build. What you are allowed to do with the fare data depends on the supplier and on your plan. Some sources set rules on how long results may be held, how many searches you can run in a day, which fares may be displayed and what has to be shown to the traveller before payment, and ticketing and payment arrangements differ as well. Those terms come from the suppliers rather than from us, so we cannot promise identical freedom across every source you may want to add later. A good next step is to decide whether you want full control of the design or the quickest route to taking bookings, then tell us which pages of your current site the booking flow should sit behind so we can advise on the better fit.

Question 8

Can I add my own pages to my portal, like an about us page and a blog, or is it only the booking part?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. A white label portal is really two things working together: the booking part where people search and pay, and an ordinary website around it where you tell your own story. Pages like about us, contact us, visa guidance, destination guides and your terms and conditions sit in that second part, and you can add and edit them yourself without touching anything to do with the booking engine. In practice you log in, create the page, type your text, add your pictures, and choose whether it appears in the top menu or the footer. The page picks up your colours and logo so it looks like the rest of the site rather than something bolted on. A blog usually works the same way, with each post as its own page, though whether a proper blog section is included can depend on your package, so it is worth asking rather than assuming. There are limits worth knowing. The search results and the hotel and flight detail pages are built from supplier content, so you cannot rewrite those the way you can rewrite your own pages. Anything with an unusual layout, like a landing page with a custom design, may still need a designer to set up once, even though you can edit the words afterwards. Before you go live, write down the pages you actually want, then ask which of them your plan covers and who sets up the first versions.

Question 9

Can I sell the hotels I have my own direct deals with on my portal alongside the ones that come from the suppliers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can sell your own directly contracted hotels on the same portal as the hotels that come in through the booking APIs, although whether this is switched on for you depends on your plan. The way it normally works is that you load the hotel yourself from your admin area. You enter the property details, the photos and description, the room types, your rates by season or by date range, how many rooms you hold, and your own cancellation rules. Once it is live, that hotel appears in the search results next to the supplier hotels, and in many setups you can choose to have your own properties listed first so your staff and your customers see them before anything else. The important thing to understand is that the responsibility sits with you for these hotels. There is no live feed from a supplier telling your portal that the rooms are gone or that the rate has gone up, so if your rates or your room counts are out of date, your portal will keep selling at the old figures and you will have to sort it out with the hotel. Bookings for your own hotels come to you rather than to a supplier, so somebody in your office has to pass them to the property and chase the confirmation. You may also find the same hotel showing twice if one of your suppliers sells it too, and in that case it is usually possible to hide the supplier version so only your contracted rate shows. A good next step is to tell us how many of these hotels you have and whether you hold a fixed allocation or work on request, and we can confirm what your current plan covers before you start loading them.

Question 10

If I decide to stop using the software later, do I keep my website address and my old booking records?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you keep what is genuinely yours, which normally means your web address, your branding and a copy of your booking history, but the portal software itself is licensed to you rather than sold, so the search and booking engine stops working when the subscription ends. In practice that means your domain name stays registered in your own name, so you are free to point it at a new site whenever you want. The logo, the text, the photos and any pages you wrote for your portal belong to you as well. Your booking records can usually be exported into a spreadsheet so you have the customer names, travel dates and reference numbers to hand for your own files and for your accountant. What you would not keep is the live portal pages, the connections to suppliers and the automatic voucher and ticket emails, because those are part of the service you were paying for. Bookings that are already confirmed sit with the airline, the hotel or the supplier, not inside the portal, so where the supplier contract is in your own name those bookings carry on and you deal with the supplier directly for changes and cancellations. Where you were selling through someone else's supplier agreement, the arrangement for existing bookings is set out in that agreement, so it is worth reading that part carefully rather than assuming. Before you sign anything, ask in writing what notice period applies, what format your booking data can be exported in and who the supplier contracts are held with, so you know exactly where you would stand if you ever move on.