Question 1

Can I hold a flight for a customer who needs time to pay?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes yes, but it depends on the airline and the exact fare, so it is not something that works on every booking. When an airline allows a seat to be held, your portal can create the booking without taking payment and show you the deadline the airline has set for payment. Until that deadline passes, the seat is reserved in the passenger's name and you can collect the money from your customer and then issue the ticket from the same booking screen. The important thing to understand is that this permission comes from the airline, not from the software. Full service carriers booked through a global distribution system are the ones most likely to allow a hold, and even then some of their cheapest fare types have to be ticketed straight away. Low cost carriers almost never allow it, because their system treats the booking and the payment as one single step. So on a results page you may find that one option can be held and the one next to it cannot, and that is normal rather than a fault. You also need to watch the deadline carefully. If payment is not made in time, the airline will usually cancel the held booking on its own, and when you go back to rebook, the fare and the taxes may no longer be the same as they were. For that reason it is worth treating a hold as a short courtesy to a serious customer rather than a way to park bookings you are unsure about. The next thing to do is check with each of your flight connections which of their fares allow a booking to be held, and make sure someone in your team is responsible for chasing payment well before the airline deadline arrives.

Question 2

Do I need my own contract with hotel suppliers before I can start selling hotels on my portal?

Accepted Answer

In most cases yes, you will need your own agreement with the hotel suppliers whose rates you want to sell, though some plans include access to supply you can start selling without signing anything yourself. The API connection is only the plumbing that carries rates and availability into your portal. The commercial relationship, the credit terms and the commission you earn usually sit directly between you and the supplier, and they decide who they take on. What each supplier asks for varies quite a lot. Some will sign up a new agency quickly with basic company documents, others want to see trading history, expected volume or a deposit before they switch your account on. A few are closed to new agents in certain countries altogether. Because those rules belong to the supplier and change from time to time, we cannot promise in advance that any particular one will approve you, and it is worth asking them directly before you plan around them. Once you have been approved and have your own credentials, we connect that supplier to your portal, test the searches and bookings, and your rates start showing to customers. How long the whole thing takes usually depends far more on how quickly the supplier approves your account than on the connection work itself. A good next step is to make a short list of the suppliers you actually want to sell, ask each of them what their signup requirements are, and then send us that list so we can confirm which ones are already supported.

Question 3

Can I see which searches my customers are making and how many of them turn into bookings?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually see both sides of that picture from the reporting area of your portal. A white label portal records what people search for and what they go on to book, so you can compare the two and work out where you are losing people. That gives you a much clearer view of how the site is performing than simply counting the bookings that land at the end of the month. Typically you can see the routes and destinations being searched most often, the travel dates people are looking at, how many searches came back with nothing to show, and which bookings were confirmed, cancelled or left unpaid. How much detail you get does depend on your plan and on what each supplier sends back, so some reports are standard and others sit on higher plans. It is worth checking which ones are included before you build a sales plan around them. There are honest limits. A search that returns no results tells you something is missing, but the supplier does not always say why, so you may still need to run the same search yourself to see whether it is the dates, the destination or a fare rule causing it. And if you want to know how visitors move around the site, which pages they leave from and where they arrived from, that normally comes from adding a website analytics tool to your portal rather than from the booking reports. Ask to see the reporting screens on a demo portal before you launch, check whether you can export the figures you need, and confirm which of your staff logins are allowed to open those reports.

Question 4

Will the budget airlines show up on my portal, or only the big full service ones?

Accepted Answer

Yes, budget airlines can show up on your portal, but how many of them you get depends on which flight suppliers your plan is connected to. The big full service carriers are the easiest part, because they have been selling through the traditional booking systems for a long time. The low cost carriers sit outside some of those systems, so they reach your portal through aggregators or through direct airline connections instead, and the list of carriers available that way is not the same in every market. In practice this means you may find that most of the low cost airlines flying your main routes are there, while one or two are missing because they only sell on their own website in your region, or because the connection for them is not included in the supplier you are using. We can tell you which carriers your current setup covers, and if a particular airline matters a lot to your business, it is worth asking before you assume it will be in your results. It also helps to know that budget fares behave differently once they are in the search. They are usually non refundable, bags and seats are sold as paid extras rather than being included, and changes after ticketing often follow the airline's own rules, so your portal may offer fewer self service options on those bookings than on a full service ticket. None of that stops you selling them, but your staff should expect it. The next step is to run a few test searches on the routes you sell most and compare what comes back against the airlines you know fly them, then send us any carrier you expected to see and did not.

Question 5

Can I handle a big group booking, like a wedding party all travelling together, on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Partly, but not usually as one single booking. Airlines set a limit on how many travellers can sit on one booking made through the normal search and book channels that your portal uses, and that limit is quite small. Above it, the airline wants the request to go to its group desk, where fares are quoted by hand, held for a while and often need a deposit. That process is not something a live search can do, so your portal will not quote a true group fare for a large party. What you can do is split the party across several bookings. Your portal will let you do that, and most agencies handle weddings and family parties this way. The honest warning is that each booking is priced on its own, so the last few travellers may end up on a dearer fare if the cheap seats run out while you are working, and seats together are not guaranteed. Booking the largest group first and working quickly helps. Hotels are easier. If the property has enough rooms loaded by the supplier, you can book several rooms at once, and you can repeat the booking if you need more. Very large room blocks, the kind where you want a held allocation and payment later, still need a direct contract with the hotel rather than a live supplier rate. For a wedding party, the practical route is to get a quote from the airline group desk or your consolidator, then record that group as an offline booking in the software so the invoice, the passenger names and the payments all sit beside your online bookings. Check with each of your suppliers what their own group rules are before you promise the client a price.

Question 6

Do the hotel photos and descriptions come with the hotel suppliers, or do I have to write them all myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in almost all cases the photos, descriptions, facility lists and star ratings come through with the hotel feed from your suppliers, so you are not left writing thousands of hotel pages by hand. When a customer opens a hotel on your portal, the images and the write up you see are the ones the supplier holds for that property, and they load automatically as soon as your connection is live. The honest limit is that the quality is not even. Some suppliers send a generous set of images, room by room descriptions, check in and check out times and a full list of facilities. Others send a short paragraph and only a handful of pictures, and a few smaller properties have very little content at all. Hotel content is also usually stored and refreshed on a schedule rather than pulled fresh on every search, so if a hotel has just been refurbished or changed its name, the pictures and text may lag behind reality for a while until the supplier updates them. For hotels you contract directly yourself, you upload your own photos and write your own description, and that is fully in your hands. For supplier hotels, how much you are allowed to edit, hide or replace depends on the supplier terms and on your plan, because the images are licensed to them rather than to you, so we would need to confirm that case by case. A good next step is to ask us which content sets come with the suppliers on your plan, then spot check the handful of hotels you sell most often and tell us if anything looks thin or out of date.

Question 7

Can I change the look of my portal myself, like the colours and the homepage pictures, without hiring a web designer?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most of the everyday look and feel of your portal is yours to change from your own admin login, with no designer needed. That normally covers your logo, your main colours, the banner pictures on the homepage, the headline wording, your contact details, your footer text and your social media links. You save the change and it appears on the live site, so you can refresh a seasonal banner or swap a logo yourself in a few minutes. Where it gets more limited is the structure of the pages. The search form, the results list and the booking steps are built to work with whatever your flight and hotel suppliers send back, so those pages follow a set layout rather than being moved around freely. Adding a new page, rearranging the homepage into a different shape or changing fonts beyond the set we offer is design work rather than a setting, and whether that is included or quoted separately depends on your plan. Two practical things to watch. Pictures look best when they match the size the banner expects, otherwise they stretch or crop in odd ways, so it is worth preparing images to the stated size before you upload. And always open the site on a phone after you change anything, because a banner that reads well on a laptop can hide your headline on a small screen. When you have a moment on a quiet day, log in and look for the branding or appearance section, try one small change such as the homepage banner, and ask us in writing which parts of your plan are self-service before you promise anyone a full redesign.

Question 8

Do my customers get their e-ticket straight away after they pay for a flight on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the ticket is issued automatically as soon as the payment goes through, and your customer receives the ticket by email without you having to do anything. The portal talks to the airline or the supplier, gets the ticket number back, and sends the confirmation out under your own agency branding. That said, not every booking behaves the same way. Some airlines accept the booking first and only confirm the ticket a short while later, so your customer may briefly see a pending status before the ticket arrives. If your card payments go through a gateway that holds funds for checking, ticketing waits until that check clears. A few fare types, and certain suppliers, are set up so a person has to issue the ticket rather than the system doing it on its own. Low cost carriers are usually instant because the ticket is created at the moment of sale, while fares coming through other channels can vary. This really does depend on the airline, the supplier you are connected to and the way your account is configured, so it is not something anyone can promise will always be immediate. On your side you will see the booking status clearly, so you know whether a ticket has been issued, is still pending, or has failed and needs attention. You can resend the ticket to a customer who has lost the email, and your staff can follow up on anything stuck rather than waiting for the customer to call you. It is worth asking which of your fare sources issue automatically and which do not, then adding a short line at checkout telling customers what to expect, and running a live test booking on each supplier before you go live.

Question 9

Will my customers see the local city tax or resort fee before they book a hotel, or do they only find out at check in?

Accepted Answer

In most cases yes, they will see it before they book, as long as the hotel supplier sends that information along with the rate. Hotel booking APIs normally split the cost into what the guest pays you now and what they must pay at the property, and the portal shows that second part as a separate line in the room details and again on the review page before payment. It usually appears with a label such as city tax, tourist tax, resort fee or cleaning fee, so your customer can see it is extra rather than hidden inside the room price. The honest limit is that this depends entirely on the supplier data. Some suppliers pass mandatory extras as proper structured amounts, which we can display cleanly. Others only mention them inside the long hotel policy text, and a few say nothing at all until the guest arrives. New local taxes are also a common gap, because when a city introduces one it can take a while to reach supplier feeds. So the portal shows what it is given, and we cannot invent a figure that the supplier has not sent. Because of that, the safest habit is to treat these extras as something you mention rather than something the system guarantees. Many agencies add a short line to their booking terms saying that local taxes and property fees may be collected directly by the hotel, which protects you when a supplier has not supplied the detail. What I would do next is run a few test searches in the destinations you sell most, open the room details and the confirmation voucher, and see how clearly the payable at hotel section appears for your suppliers, then tell us which ones look thin so we can check whether more of that data can be pulled through.

Question 10

Can I give my customers a discount code to use at checkout on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can create your own discount codes and let customers type them in at checkout, although how much control you get over the rules depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up. The usual way it works is that you create a code in your admin area, decide whether it takes off a percentage or a fixed amount, and set a start and end date so it stops working on its own. Many setups also let you limit a code to one type of product, such as hotels only, or stop the same customer using it again and again. If you sell through sub agents, you can normally decide whether the code is for your direct customers only or whether your agents can pass it on too. The honest limit is that the discount comes out of your own margin, not out of the supplier's rate. Your suppliers send a net rate, you add your markup on top, and a discount code simply reduces what the customer pays at the end. Airlines and hotel suppliers will still invoice you the same amount, so if a code is worth more than the markup you added, you end up selling that booking at a loss. Some fares also have to be shown exactly as the supplier provides them, which is why a code is normally applied to the final total rather than to the fare itself. Before you promote a code anywhere, check what markup you currently have set, then create one test code, run a test booking and look at what actually lands in the final total and in your reports.