Question 1

Can I offer my customers hotel rooms they pay for at the hotel instead of paying me upfront?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases, but it depends on which hotel suppliers you are connected to and which rates they send. Alongside prepaid rates, a lot of suppliers also offer pay at the property rates, and when they do, those rates arrive through the hotel API already marked as such. Your portal can display that marking so the customer sees, before they confirm, whether they are paying now or paying at check in. For the customer the flow is simple. They still enter card details, because the hotel or the supplier normally wants a guarantee against the room, but no payment is taken by you at the time of booking. They settle directly with the property, usually in the local currency of the hotel, and their voucher will state that payment is due on arrival. Not every property and not every room type will offer this, and in plenty of cases the prepaid rate is the cheaper of the two. That choice sits with the hotel and the supplier, not with the portal. On your side it changes how and when you get paid. Because no money passes through you, your earnings come later, either as commission from the supplier or however your agreement with them is set up, and you need to watch no show and late cancellation terms because those costs can still land somewhere. If you would rather always be paid before travel, these rates can be hidden so only prepaid options show, though what you can switch on or off will depend on your plan. Ask your hotel supplier which of their rate types allow payment at the property and what their no show rules are, then let us know whether you want those rates shown or hidden on your portal.

Question 2

Can I give my staff their own logins on the software and stop them from seeing my profit on each booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can set up a separate login for each member of staff and control what each one is allowed to see, including hiding your profit on a booking. How far that control goes depends on the plan you are on, so it is worth confirming before you promise anything to your team. The usual way it works is that every person gets their own username and password, and each login is given a role such as booking staff, accounts or manager. The role decides which screens open when they sign in. A booking consultant can search, quote and issue a ticket while the supplier cost and your markup stay out of view, and the reports that show what you earned are kept for you and whoever handles your accounts. Because each person signs in separately, you can also see who made which booking, which helps a lot when a customer rings up about something. There are limits to be honest about. Some plans offer a few ready made roles rather than a switch for every single screen, so you may not be able to hide one small field on its own. Sensitive actions like cancelling a booking, issuing a refund or editing a markup rule are often kept with the owner by default. And anything a supplier or airline sends straight to a traveller is outside what we can mask, so a document that arrives from them may show detail you would rather keep private. Before you add anyone, write down each person and the tasks they actually need to carry out, then check which roles and permissions your plan includes so you set them up correctly the first time.

Question 3

Can my customers book flights for children and infants on my portal, and will they get the child fare?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can take bookings for children and infants on flights, and it will ask for the right passenger type at the search stage. When the customer selects a child or an infant, the search goes out to the airline or the supplier with that passenger type included, and the fare that comes back is the child or infant fare the airline has filed rather than the adult one. You will normally be asked for each young traveller's date of birth, because the age on the day of travel, not the day of booking, decides whether they count as an infant, a child or an adult. Two things matter in practice. An infant travelling on a parent's lap and an infant with their own seat are treated as different passenger types, so the customer has to choose correctly at the search stage, because changing it later usually means cancelling and booking again. Also, whether a reduced fare exists at all is entirely up to the airline, so on many low cost carriers and on some promotional fares a child pays close to the same as an adult. Your portal shows what the supplier sends back and cannot create a discount the airline has not filed. Unaccompanied minors are a different situation. Most airlines handle children travelling alone only through their own service desk, with forms and a separate fee, so those bookings are generally not possible online and your team will need to arrange them with the airline directly. Before you start advertising family fares, run a few test searches on your busiest routes with one adult and one child and see what each supplier returns, and check that your booking form is collecting dates of birth properly.

Question 4

If my internet goes down or I am away from the office, will my portal keep taking bookings on its own?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal keeps working whether or not you are at your desk. A white label portal runs online and is reached by your customers through their own browsers, so it has no link to the internet connection in your office. If your broadband fails on a Saturday afternoon, or you close for a public holiday, or you are travelling, customers can still search, choose and pay, and the booking goes through to the supplier in the normal way. You only need your own connection when you want to log in and look at what has happened. What changes when you are away is not the booking, it is your ability to deal with anything unusual. Payments that get flagged for review, a customer who writes in asking to change a date, a supplier message about a schedule change, or a booking that does not complete properly all sit there waiting for a person. Setting up email or message alerts so you hear about those quickly is worth doing, and it helps to decide in advance who covers weekends and evenings even if that is just you checking once a day. There are honest limits that are not about your office at all. Some fares and rates need the supplier system to answer in the moment, so if a supplier has an outage then that part of your portal may show fewer results or none until they recover. Instant ticketing also depends on the supplier and the fare type, so a booking made overnight may still need a manual step in the morning before documents are issued. Which of those apply to you depends on the suppliers connected to your portal and your plan. Before you rely on unattended bookings, test one yourself outside working hours and check that the confirmation reached the customer and that you were alerted, then write down who handles anything that needs a human.

Question 5

Can I send my customer one travel document with all their flights, hotels and transfers together instead of separate confirmations?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. Travel agency software usually groups everything a customer has booked for the same trip under one reference, and from there you can produce a single itinerary document that lists the flights, the hotel nights, the transfers and the tours in date order, with your agency name and logo on it. You can normally email it straight from the booking screen or download it as a file and send it yourself, and you can reissue it later if something in the trip changes. There are a few honest limits. The itinerary document is your own summary, so it does not replace the documents the suppliers issue. The airline e-ticket number, the hotel voucher and some tour vouchers come from the supplier, and in many cases the customer still needs those to check in, so a good practice is to send the combined itinerary as the overview and attach or follow with the supplier documents. How much detail each line shows also depends on what the supplier sends back, so one hotel may give a full address and check in time while another gives less. If part of the trip was arranged offline, such as a rail ticket or a hotel you contracted yourself, it will only appear on the document if you record it in the software first. Once it is recorded alongside the online bookings, it sits in the same trip and prints with the rest. The next step is to make a test trip with two or three elements, generate the itinerary and read it as your customer would, then tell us which fields or wording you want changed on your template.

Question 6

Can my customers search flexible dates on my portal to find the cheapest day to fly?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a flexible date search is normally possible, though how far it goes depends on which flight suppliers are connected to your portal. The common version is a search that looks at a few days either side of the date your customer typed, so they can see whether leaving a day earlier or returning a day later brings the fare down. A full calendar view across a whole month is heavier work, because the portal has to ask the supplier for many date combinations at once, and not every flight source will answer that kind of request. The difference usually comes down to where the fares are coming from. Content from the big global distribution systems tends to support date range searching well, because it was designed with that in mind. Low cost carriers and some direct airline connections often answer one date at a time, so a month view for those can be slower, incomplete, or simply unavailable. If one particular airline matters a lot to your business, test it on your own portal before you promise the feature to customers. There is also a speed trade off to keep in mind. Every extra date is another question to the supplier, so a wide flexible search takes noticeably longer to come back, and customers do not wait patiently. Many agencies find three days either side is the practical sweet spot, and keep a wider cheapest month view only for the routes they sell most often. Take a look at which flight sources are switched on for your portal, run a flexible search on your two or three busiest routes, and then decide whether a wider date range is worth the extra waiting time.

Question 7

Can my customer add a special request when they book a hotel on my portal, like a late arrival or a room on a high floor?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your customer can add a special request when they book a hotel on your portal, but whether the hotel actually does it is never guaranteed. The request is passed along with the booking, it is not something the hotel has agreed to in advance. How the request reaches the hotel depends on the supplier behind the rate. Some hotel connections accept a plain text note that travels with the reservation, so your customer can type something like a late arrival after midnight, a quiet room, or a room away from the lift. Others offer a fixed set of choices instead, such as non smoking, twin beds or a double bed, or honeymoon stay, and anything outside that list cannot be sent. A few older connections pass nothing at all beyond the guest name and the room type. Because of that, you may see a request box on some hotels and not on others in the same search, and that is the supplier, not a fault in your portal. It also helps to set expectations with your customers in writing. A bed type, a floor, adjoining rooms or an early check in are requests, not confirmed parts of the rate, and the hotel can charge for some of them on arrival or simply say no if it is full. Anything your customer genuinely cannot travel without, such as step free access or a cot, is safer handled by contacting the hotel directly once the booking is confirmed, with the reference number to hand. Run one test booking on your own portal and look at what the request field offers on a few different hotels, then add a short line to your confirmation wording telling customers that requests are subject to availability at check in.

Question 8

Do I need my own IATA number before I can start selling flights on my white label portal?

Accepted Answer

No, you do not always need your own IATA number to start selling flights on a white label portal. Many agencies begin by selling through a consolidator or a flight content provider that already holds the airline relationships, and the portal simply displays and books the fares that are made available to you. In that arrangement the ticket is issued under the supplier's accreditation, you earn through the markup or commission you have agreed with them, and you can be trading without going through accreditation yourself. That said, it does depend on who is supplying your flights and where you are based. Some suppliers will only open a flight connection to agencies that hold accreditation or a licence in their own country, some ask for a deposit or a guarantee from your bank instead, and others are happy to work with non accredited agents under their own ticketing. Local rules matter too, because in certain markets you need a travel licence or a bond to sell to the public no matter where your content comes from. We can connect your portal to whichever supplier you sign with, but we cannot change the conditions they set. Having your own accreditation later usually gives you better commercial terms and direct ticketing, so many agencies start with a consolidator and apply once their booking volume justifies it. Your portal does not have to be rebuilt when that day comes, because the flight source sitting behind it can be swapped or added to. Before you commit to anything, ask the suppliers you are considering what they require from a new agency, and check what licence or bond your own country expects from a business selling travel to the public.

Question 9

Can I stop certain airlines from showing on my portal if I do not want to sell them?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can control which airlines appear in your flight results, although how far that control reaches depends on the suppliers you are connected to and the plan you are on. The usual way this works is a filter set at portal level, where you list the airline codes you want hidden and the search simply stops returning them. You can normally apply this to every search, or only to certain routes or certain sales channels, so your staff might still see a carrier that your public website does not show. Agencies ask for this for sensible reasons, such as having no agreement with a particular carrier, poor service experiences, or wanting to steer sales towards a preferred partner. A change like this affects new searches only, so bookings already made stay exactly as they are. There are limits worth knowing about. When a supplier returns a combined itinerary, a blocked airline can still turn up as a connecting leg operated on behalf of another carrier, because the result is sold under a different code. Direct low cost carrier connections do not always respond to the same filters as fares coming from a global distribution source. And blocking too much can leave you looking expensive or short of options on routes where the hidden carrier is the obvious choice. Write down the airlines you want removed and the routes that matter most to you, then ask us to confirm which of your live suppliers support filtering, and run a few test searches afterwards to see what your customers will actually get.

Question 10

Why does the hotel price sometimes change between the search results and the payment page on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this does happen, and in most cases it is normal in hotel distribution rather than a fault in your portal. To make searches fast, results are built from rates the supplier has already shared, so a long list of hotels can come back in a few seconds. When your customer picks a room and moves towards payment, the portal goes back to the supplier and checks that one exact rate again. If anything has changed in the meantime, the fresh answer from the supplier is what gets shown, because that is the only price the booking can actually be confirmed at. There are a few usual reasons for the change. The cheapest rooms may have sold out, so what is left is a slightly different room or a dearer allocation. The hotel may have repriced that date, or a promotion may have ended. Taxes and local fees are sometimes calculated properly only once the real dates and guest numbers are known. If you sell in a currency other than the one the supplier quotes in, the conversion rate applied at the time of booking can shift the total a little as well. How often you see this depends on the supplier and on how their connection works. Some refresh their rates very frequently and you will rarely notice a difference, while others update less often and price changes show up more. We cannot promise that the price in the search list will always hold, because that sits with the supplier and the hotel, not with us. What we can do is make sure any change is shown clearly to your customer before they pay, rather than appearing quietly on the confirmation. It is worth watching your own results for a week or two to see whether one supplier is behind most of the changes, and if so, send us a few examples so we can look at how that connection is set up for you.