Question 1

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telling your portal that the rooms are gone or that the rate has gone up, so if your rates or your room counts are out of date, your portal will keep selling at the old figures and you will have to sort it out with the hotel.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 2

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.

Question 3

Does my customer get their hotel voucher straight away after they book, or do some hotels need to be confirmed first?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the voucher is ready straight away, but not for every hotel. The majority of rooms sold through hotel booking APIs are confirmed instantly, because the supplier already holds live availability for that room type. When your customer pays, the booking is sent, the hotel reference comes back within seconds, and the voucher can be emailed to them or downloaded from your booking records while they are still on the page. A smaller number of rooms are what suppliers call on request. That means the supplier has to go back to the hotel and ask before the booking is certain. In that case your customer gets a pending confirmation rather than a voucher, and the final answer can take anything from a few minutes to a day or more depending on the hotel and the supplier. Whether a property behaves this way is set by the supplier, not by your portal, so it varies between connections and between seasons. Your portal will show the status of each booking so you can see which ones are confirmed and which are still waiting, and the voucher becomes available as soon as the supplier confirms. Whether the pending status is also shown to the customer, and whether their card is charged immediately or held, depends on how your suppliers and your payment setup are configured, so it is worth agreeing that with us rather than assuming. Before you go live, book a test room on each of your hotel connections and see how quickly the voucher appears, and ask us to set the wording your customers see on any booking that comes back as on request.

Question 4

Can I take a booking over the phone and enter it myself for a customer who does not want to book online?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. Most travel businesses still take a good share of their work by phone or walk in, and the software is built with that in mind. Alongside the customer facing portal there is an agent side where you and your staff log in, run the same search, pick the flight or the hotel and complete the booking on the customer's behalf while you have them on the line. The customer never has to touch a screen, and the booking lands in the same list as the online ones so all your records sit in one place. There is usually also a way to record a booking you arranged completely outside the system, for example a room you held directly with a hotel you contract with yourself, or a supplier that is not connected to your portal. You type in the traveller names, the dates, what you paid and what you are charging, and the system keeps it as a booking so it appears in your reports and you can send an invoice and a voucher with your own branding from the same screen. It helps to know the difference between the two. A booking made through a connected supplier is live, so the cancellation terms, the ticket details and any change messages come back to you automatically. A booking you typed in by hand is only a record, so if the hotel moves the room or the supplier changes something, you will hear it from them directly and you will need to update the entry yourself. Whether manual entry is available to you can also depend on your plan, so it is worth confirming. If this matters to how you work, ask us to show you the agent booking screen and tell us which of your suppliers you book direct, and we can confirm what will be live and what you would keep by hand.

Question 5

Can my portal be shown in other languages so I can sell to customers abroad?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can be shown in more than one language, so a customer in another country can read and book in their own words. The menus, buttons, search forms, booking steps, confirmation pages and any pages you write yourself can all be translated, and the visitor either picks a language from a selector at the top of the page or has it chosen from their browser setting. The honest limit is the content that comes from the suppliers. Hotel names, room descriptions, facility lists, fare rules and cancellation terms are sent in by the airline or hotel supplier, and many of them only send that text in English. Some send a few languages, some send none. So you can end up with a fully translated site holding an English hotel description inside it. Automatic translation can be switched on to cover the gap, but it reads less naturally than wording written by a person, and for cancellation rules it is usually safer to keep the supplier's own words so nothing important is changed. There are two other things to plan for. Your emails, vouchers and invoices are separate from the website, so each one needs its own translated version if you want the whole journey in a single language. And a language that reads right to left needs layout work rather than just a translated word list, so it takes longer to add than a European one. Which languages are included also depends on your plan. A sensible next step is to decide which markets you really want to sell to, then check which of your suppliers provide their own content in those languages before you pay for any translation work.

Question 6

Can my customers book more than one room at the same hotel in one booking on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your customers can book several rooms at the same hotel in a single booking on your portal. The search form normally lets them say how many rooms they need and how many adults and children are going in each room, and the results come back priced for the whole party instead of for one room at a time, so the customer pays once and you handle one booking rather than several. How far this goes depends on the hotel supplier behind the search. Some suppliers happily quote rooms with different occupancy in the same search, for example a couple in one room and children in another, while others only return a clean price when every room has the same number of guests. In that case the portal may need to run the rooms as separate searches, or the customer may see fewer options than usual. Children's ages also matter, because many suppliers need the exact age of each child to work out whether they stay free, share a bed or need an extra bed, and the price can change once those ages are entered. On the hotel side you will usually get one confirmation covering all the rooms, though a few suppliers issue a separate reference for each room, and the cancellation deadline can apply to each room on its own. Rooms being next to each other or on the same floor is almost never guaranteed, it is passed to the hotel as a request only. Before you promise this to a family or a small group, run a test multi room search on your own portal with children included and see what your connected suppliers actually return, and make clear to the customer that room location is a request rather than a guarantee.

Question 7

If an airline's system is down when my customer searches, will my whole portal stop working?

Accepted Answer

No, one airline or one supplier going quiet does not take your whole portal down. When someone searches flights on your portal, the request goes out to every supplier you are connected to at the same time, and the portal shows whatever comes back in time. If one of them is slow or not answering, your customer still sees the results from the others, and the only difference is that the list has fewer options on it than usual. Your customers are not told which supplier is missing, so most of the time they will not notice anything at all. What you may notice is the speed. Flight results are priced live by the airlines and suppliers, so a search is only ever as quick as they are, and heavy searches take longer because there is far more to price, for example long trips with several legs, large passenger numbers or open dates. Rather than leaving your customer watching a loading screen forever, the portal waits a set period and then shows what it has. There is a real limit worth being honest about. If the supplier that carries most of your fares is having trouble, your results will look thin or empty for as long as that lasts, and nothing on our side can create fares that the supplier is not sending. The same applies at the final step, where a booking can still fail after a good search, because the fare and the seat are only certain once the airline accepts the request. If you see empty or very short results, try the same search again a little later and check whether it is one route or everything, then send us the route and dates you used so we can see which supplier is at fault.

Question 8

Will my portal work properly on my customers' phones, or do I need a separate mobile app?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal is built to work on a phone as well as on a laptop, because most travel searches now start on a small screen. The same website adjusts itself to the size of the screen it is opened on, so the search box, the results and the payment pages reflow to fit a phone, and you do not need to build a separate mobile site or publish an app in the app stores to take bookings from mobile visitors. On a smaller screen some things are arranged differently so the pages stay usable. Long result lists tend to load in batches as the customer scrolls, filters often sit behind a button instead of down the side, and wide detail such as fare rules or baggage allowance may need a tap to open out. Your logo, colours and homepage pictures carry across, although a very tall or very wide banner can crop differently on a phone, so it helps to choose images that still read well when they are narrowed. The parts we cannot promise for are the ones that are not ours. Card payment pages, airline seat maps and certain supplier screens open in their own window, and how neatly those behave on a phone is down to that provider rather than us. Very old handsets and out of date browsers can also struggle. If your plan includes extra pages that you or a designer have added yourself, those need checking on their own, because they will not automatically follow the mobile layout. Open your own portal on your phone and run a real search and a test booking all the way through, and ask a colleague to try it on a different handset so you spot any awkward step before your customers do.

Question 9

Can my portal show prices in my customer's own currency instead of only one?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases a portal can show prices in more than one currency, although how many you can offer depends on your suppliers and on your payment setup. The way it normally works is that your suppliers quote fares and room rates in their own currency, and your portal converts that into whatever currency the customer is viewing. The conversion can run off a rate you set yourself or a rate that refreshes automatically each day, and you can usually add a small buffer on top so a movement in the market during the day does not eat into your margin. Many portals also guess the right currency from where the visitor is browsing from, with a selector so the customer can switch it if the guess is wrong. The part worth separating in your mind is the currency the customer sees and the currency they are actually charged. Those are only the same if your payment provider can settle in that currency, and some providers handle only a limited set. Where they cannot, the customer's own bank does the conversion and the amount on their statement can come out slightly different from the amount they saw on screen, which is worth saying plainly on your checkout page. There are also cases where a supplier quotes in one fixed currency only, or where an air ticket has to be issued in the currency of your point of sale, so you cannot always sell in anything you like. A good next step is to check which currencies your suppliers quote in and which ones your payment provider can settle, then decide your display list and your conversion buffer before you go live.

Question 10

Can my customers see a refundable ticket option as well as the cheapest one when they search flights on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases they can, but how much choice appears depends on the airline and on the supplier connection sitting behind your portal. Most airlines today sell the same seat on the same flight in several versions, often called fare families or branded fares. The cheapest version usually allows no changes and no refund, while a dearer one allows a date change, and the most expensive may allow a refund. When the airline passes those versions through the connection, your portal can show them together on the same flight so your customer reads the difference and chooses for themselves, instead of ringing you to ask whether the ticket is flexible. Be aware of the limits. Not every airline publishes its fare families through every connection, and some older connections return only the lowest available fare, which means your customer sees one option and nothing else. The wording the airline sends can also be short or written in airline shorthand, so it is worth reviewing how it reads on your own screens. A refundable fare rarely means the whole amount comes back either, because the airline may still keep a penalty, and the words used for each fare type are not standard across airlines, so the same label can carry different rules. The practical next step is to run a few test searches on the routes and airlines you sell most and see what actually comes back on your portal, then ask us which of your connected suppliers carry fare family details so we can switch that display on where it is available and leave your booking conditions matching what the airline really allows.