Question 1

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 2

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 3

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.

Question 4

Can I move my existing customer list and my old bookings into the software when I start?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your customer list can usually be brought across when you start, and old bookings can be loaded as records, although they will not behave like live bookings. The simplest way is a spreadsheet export from whatever you use today. Names, contact details, nationality, date of birth and passport expiry are the fields that save you the most typing later, so the cleaner and more consistent those columns are, the better the import goes. Where dates and phone formats are inconsistent, they need tidying first, and that is usually quicker for you to do than for anyone else to guess at. How much import help is included depends on your plan, so it is worth asking before you assume it is part of the setup. Past bookings are more limited, and it is fairer to say so plainly. A booking made somewhere else was never created through the suppliers connected to your portal, so the portal has no live link to it. You can keep it as a historical record, which helps with reporting and with seeing what a repeat customer bought last year, but you cannot amend it, cancel it or reissue a ticket from it. Anything that needs changing still has to be handled wherever it was originally booked. Before you move anything, export a sample of your customers and a handful of old bookings, then ask for the list of fields the software expects, so you can see exactly what will carry over and what will stay behind.

Question 5

Do my customers have to create an account on my portal before they can book?

Accepted Answer

No, in most cases your customers can book as a guest without creating an account first. A white label portal will normally let someone search, pick a flight or a hotel, enter the traveller details and pay in one go, and the booking reference is then sent to the email address they typed in. Asking people to register before they can even see a price is one of the quickest ways to lose a sale, so guest booking is usually the default. You can still offer an account as a choice rather than a rule. When a customer signs up, their traveller details and past bookings are saved, so repeat trips take less typing and they can look up their own booking later instead of ringing your office. Some agencies ask corporate clients to register, because the travel manager wants a record of everyone travelling from the company, and leave registration switched off on the public side of the site. There are limits worth knowing about. Whether guest booking can be turned on or off, and how much of the sign up form you can change, depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up for you. Card payments can also trigger extra checks from the payment provider, and some suppliers insist on full passenger details before they will confirm, so a guest booking is not always a very short form. Those rules sit with the supplier and the payment side rather than with the portal itself. Decide which customers you want to register and which you would rather let through quickly, then check with us what your current setup allows before you change anything.

Question 6

Can my customers book airport transfers and day tours on my portal, or is it only flights and hotels?

Accepted Answer

Yes, transfers and day tours can sit on your portal alongside flights and hotels, but they come from their own suppliers, so what your customers actually see depends on which connections are switched on for your account and on what your plan includes. They normally appear as their own search tab, with the same look and branding as the rest of your site, so a customer can search a flight, then a hotel, then a transfer without ever leaving your portal. In practice the two behave a little differently. Airport transfers are usually simple to search, you pick the airport, the hotel or address, the date and the number of passengers, and most come back confirmed straight away. Tours and activities vary more. Some are instantly confirmed, others have to be accepted by the local operator first, and the choice is much better in popular holiday cities than in smaller towns and quieter regions. We cannot promise full coverage everywhere, because that sits with the suppliers rather than with the software. You can set your own markup on these products the same way you do on flights and hotels, and the booking, the voucher and the invoice carry your agency name. In many setups you can also add a transfer or a tour to a trip the customer is already booking, so they pay once rather than twice, though whether that cross sell is available to you depends on your plan and on the suppliers behind it. The best next step is to check which transfer and activity suppliers are enabled on your account, then run a few test searches in the destinations you sell most, so you can see the real choice before you put it in front of customers.

Question 7

If my customer's name is spelt wrong on a flight booking, can I fix it on my portal myself?

Accepted Answer

Usually no, not as a direct edit you make yourself, because the name on a ticket belongs to the airline record and not to the booking software. Once a booking is made and the ticket is issued, the passenger name is locked in the airline's system, and no travel portal can quietly overwrite it. What your portal can do is let you find the booking and raise an amendment or correction request against it, which then goes to the airline through the supplier the fare came from. Whether the correction is actually allowed depends entirely on the airline and the fare rule, so this is one area where we cannot promise an outcome. Many full service airlines will accept a minor spelling correction on the same passenger, sometimes free of charge and sometimes with a fee. Budget airlines often treat any change to a name as a new booking altogether. Some cheaper fare types do not permit corrections at all, and the only route left is to cancel and rebook, which can mean losing part or all of what was paid. Timing makes a big difference too. If you catch the mistake before the ticket is issued, the chances of a clean fix are much better. After ticketing it gets harder, and once check in has opened or the flight has departed there is generally nothing anyone can do. This is also why a correction is not instant, as the portal has to wait on the airline's answer rather than confirming it for you on the spot. The practical habit worth building is to read the name back from the passport before you confirm any flight, and if you do spot an error afterwards, raise the request the same day rather than leaving it until closer to travel.

Question 8

Can my customers pay by card directly on my portal, or do I have to take the payment myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your customers can pay by card on your portal, as long as you have a payment gateway set up in your own name. The way it normally works is that you open a merchant account with a payment gateway, and that gateway is then connected to your portal. When a customer pays, the money lands in your own account, not in anyone else's, and the booking carries on to the supplier from there. You can usually offer more than one way to pay at the same time, so an online customer pays by card while someone who walks into your office pays by bank transfer or cash and you mark that booking as paid yourself. There are a few honest limits worth knowing. Which gateways you can use depends on where your business is registered and which providers actually operate in your country, and the gateway has to approve your account, which is their decision and not something we control. Travel is treated as a higher risk trade by some banks, so you may be asked for extra paperwork or for a reserve to be held back before you are approved. Separately, some airline and hotel suppliers want settlement at the moment of booking, so if you let a customer pay you later, you may still have to pay the supplier first and collect afterwards. Before you go live, check with your bank or gateway that they are happy to take on a travel business, then decide which payment methods you want on the website and which ones you would rather handle offline, and let us know so we can switch them on for your portal.

Question 9

Can my customers see which hotels can be cancelled free of charge and up to what date before they book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases they can see that before they pay. A hotel booking API normally sends a cancellation policy along with each room rate, so your portal can show on the room itself whether the rate is refundable, whether there is a free cancellation window, and the date the window closes. Many portals also show the same wording again on the payment page and on the confirmation, so nobody can say they were not told. How clear that wording looks does depend on the supplier behind the rate. Some suppliers send the deadline as a proper date the portal can read and display as a short label, while others send the policy as a block of text written by the hotel, which the portal has to show as it is. A few only return the full policy once the room is selected and priced, so the detail appears a step later rather than in the first list of results. Non refundable rates are almost always marked plainly, because suppliers treat that as essential information. It is also worth knowing that free cancellation deadlines are usually set in the hotel's local time, not your customer's time, and that a rate which looks refundable can still carry a charge if the guest does not show up at all. Filtering a search so it only shows refundable rooms is possible with most suppliers, although rates that arrive without a readable deadline may be left out of that filter. Before you go live, run a few searches on hotels you sell often and check that the cancellation wording appears where your customers will actually look, and that the same wording reaches them on the confirmation email.

Question 10

Can my customers pick their seats and add extra bags on my portal, or do they have to do that with the airline?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases they can do it on your portal, but how much is on offer depends on the airline and on the supplier the fare comes from, so it will not be the same for every flight. Where the supplier passes seat maps and baggage options through to us, your customer sees them during booking, picks a seat or adds a bag, pays for it along with the fare, and it goes to the airline as part of the same booking. Where the supplier does not pass those options through, the booking still completes normally but the seat and bag choices are simply not shown. As a rough guide, low cost airlines tend to make seats and extra bags available at the time of booking because that is how they sell, while full service airlines are more mixed. Some release seat maps openly, some only allow a seat request rather than a firm assignment, and some keep paid seats and extra bags for their own website or airport counter. Meals, lounge access and other extras follow the same pattern, so treat anything beyond the fare itself as something to confirm rather than assume. It is also worth knowing that an extra bought at booking is usually confirmed with the ticket, whereas a request made after ticketing may need to go through the airline directly using the booking reference. If an airline does not accept an extra through the channel we have, the honest answer is that your customer will need to add it on the airline side, and your staff can guide them to that instead of promising something the airline will not take. The next step is to tell us which flight suppliers you plan to use and we can confirm which of them support seat selection and paid baggage at booking, so you know in advance where your team will need to send customers to the airline.