Question 1

If my customer cancels a booking, how does their refund actually get back to them?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can cancel a booking from the portal and see what is being refunded, but the money reaching your customer is a separate step from the cancellation itself, so it helps to understand both halves. When you cancel, the portal sends the request to the supplier and records what comes back, which may be a full refund, a part refund, or nothing at all if the booking was past its free cancellation window. That outcome comes from the supplier's own rules, not from us, so the cancellation policy shown on the rate before you book is the thing worth reading carefully. The portal will keep the cancellation reference and the refund amount on the booking record so you have proof of what was agreed. How the money moves depends on how the booking was paid for. If your customer paid by card through your own payment gateway, the refund normally goes back to the same card and your gateway handles it, which usually takes some working days to show on their statement. If you settled with the supplier from a credit or deposit arrangement, the refund tends to come back into that balance instead, and you then pay your customer yourself. Airline refunds are often slower than hotel ones because the airline has to process them in its own time, and some tickets are non refundable apart from taxes. Before you promise a date to a customer, check with your payment provider how long card refunds take and whether their fees come back, and ask each of your suppliers what refund timeline they work to so you can set honest expectations.

Question 2

Can my customers look up their own bookings on my portal instead of ringing my office every time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label portal can give your customers their own login area where they sign in and see the bookings they have made with you, so simple questions do not always have to come through your phone line. In that area they can normally view their booking reference, travel dates, passenger or guest names, the hotel or flight details and the current status of the booking, all under your own branding with no sign of anyone else's name. What appears there depends on the type of booking and on the supplier behind it. Bookings that confirm straight away usually show full details within moments. Bookings that have to wait for the hotel or airline to accept will only show as confirmed once that reply comes back, and travel documents such as hotel vouchers or electronic tickets appear once the supplier has actually issued them. Bookings you took over the phone and entered by hand will show up too, as long as you record them against the same customer record. Whether customers can go further and change or cancel on their own is a separate decision. Some agencies prefer to keep those buttons hidden so that every change goes through a member of staff who understands the cancellation rules and any fees involved. Others are happy to allow self service cancellation where the supplier rules permit it. What you are allowed to switch on will depend on your plan and on the suppliers you are connected to, so it is worth asking rather than assuming. The next thing to do is confirm that the customer login area is enabled on your portal, then make a test booking yourself and sign in as a customer to see exactly what your travellers will see before you start pointing them to it.

Question 3

If a hotel cancels on my customer after they have already booked through my portal, will I find out about it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you should find out through the portal, but how quickly you hear depends on the supplier who holds that booking. When a hotel cancels or rejects a reservation, the supplier sends that change back through the connection, and the booking in your portal moves out of confirmed status so your team can see something has changed. Most setups can also send you an alert by email so you are not relying on someone happening to open the booking that day. The honest part is that suppliers do not all behave the same way. Some push a change the moment the hotel reports it, and some only report it when the booking record is next checked, which means there can be a gap between the hotel deciding and you knowing. That gap is set by the supplier, not by the portal, so for bookings that matter a lot, such as a group or a wedding, it is still worth a direct check close to travel rather than trusting silence. It is also worth being clear that the portal will tell you, but it cannot fix it for you. No booking system can make a hotel honour a room it has given away, so rebooking the customer into another property is a decision you or your staff will make. Any money owed back comes through on the supplier terms that applied to the original rate, and how long that takes varies by supplier. A good next step is to check that cancellation and change alerts are switched on and pointed at an inbox someone actually watches, and to ask which of your connected suppliers report changes automatically before your busy season starts.

Question 4

If an airline changes the flight time after my customer has booked, will I find out through my portal?

Accepted Answer

Usually yes, but how reliably you find out depends on the supplier the booking was made through. When an airline moves a departure, cancels a leg or changes an aircraft, that message travels from the airline to whoever holds the booking, and from there into your portal. Where the connection supports it, the booking record is updated with the new timing and flagged so your team can see at a glance that something has changed, and a notification can be sent to your agency inbox so you are not relying on someone opening the file by chance. The honest limit is that not every supplier pushes these messages the same way. Connections through a traditional consolidator or a full service airline tend to be good at sending schedule change notices. Low cost carriers often send the notice straight to the passenger contact details held on the booking instead, which means it may land with your customer before it lands with you, or it may need checking on the airline side. Timing varies too, as some changes arrive months ahead and some arrive the day before travel. It is also worth knowing that being told about a change is not the same as resolving it. Accepting a new timing, asking for an alternative flight or requesting a refund where the change is big enough normally has to be actioned with the airline or the supplier under their own rules, and the portal records the outcome rather than deciding it for you. Before you go live, ask which of your connected flight suppliers send schedule change messages back into the booking, and make sure the contact details stored on each booking reach your agency and not only the traveller.

Question 5

If I connect more than one hotel supplier, will the same hotel show up twice in my search results?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the same hotel can appear more than once, and it is a normal thing to see when you connect a second or third hotel supplier. Every supplier keeps its own list of properties with its own internal codes, its own spelling of the hotel name and sometimes a slightly different address, so one property can arrive from two places looking like two different hotels to the portal. The usual fix is hotel mapping, which matches properties across suppliers by name, address and map position so they are joined into a single listing. When mapping works, your customer sees the hotel once with all the available rates grouped underneath, or just the lowest one, depending on how your search results are set up. Mapping is good but it is never perfect. Large, well known hotels match easily because the supplier data is clean. Small guesthouses, apartments, newly opened properties and hotels that have recently changed name are the ones most likely to slip through and show twice. There are a few ways to reduce it. You can give one supplier priority over another so its content is used as the main record, and you can switch a supplier off for a destination where it adds nothing useful. How much control you have over this depends on your plan and on the quality of the data each supplier sends us, so it is worth asking before you add a new connection rather than after. After you connect a second supplier, run searches in the three or four destinations you sell most and send us a note about any duplicates you spot, so we can correct the mapping for those properties.

Question 6

Will my customers see how much luggage is included before they pick a flight on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases they will see the baggage allowance next to each fare before they choose, but how much detail appears depends on the airline and on which supplier the fare came from. When a flight booking API returns a fare, it normally sends the cabin bag and checked bag allowance for each passenger along with it, and the portal shows that on the results page and again on the review page before payment. For most full service airlines this comes through clearly, either as a number of bags or as a weight limit per person, so your customer can compare a cheaper fare that carries nothing in the hold against a slightly higher one that includes a suitcase. Where it gets thinner is with low cost carriers and the very cheapest branded economy fares, because some suppliers send only the basic fare with no baggage detail attached, and the true allowance is confirmed only when a bag is added as a paid extra during booking. We can only display what the supplier gives us, so if a particular airline or content source leaves that field empty, the portal shows that baggage is not included rather than inventing an allowance. Whether your customers can also buy extra bags at the time of booking depends on the supplier supporting paid extras on that route, and not all of them do. The practical step is to run a few searches on the routes you sell most, look at what the baggage line says for both a full service and a budget carrier, and tell us which supplier you are using if anything looks blank or wrong so we can check how that content is coming through.

Question 7

When I make a booking, can the software email my customer a confirmation and an invoice with my own agency logo on it?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Confirmation emails, invoices and hotel vouchers can all carry your agency name, your logo and your own contact details, so the customer only ever sees your brand on the paperwork. This applies whether the booking was made by the customer on your portal or by your staff in the back office. In practice the documents work from templates that are set up for you, and you can usually adjust the wording, the footer text and the terms you want shown. What the documents cannot do is invent information the supplier has not given us. A hotel voucher shows the property address, the booking reference, the room type and the cancellation terms as they come back from the supplier, and flight documents follow the airline and ticketing rules, so the ticket number and fare conditions appear in the form the airline provides. If a supplier returns very little detail, the voucher will look thin, and that is a supplier limitation rather than a software one. How much you can change yourself, and which documents are included, does depend on your plan. Sending the emails from your own web address rather than a generic one also needs a few settings added by whoever looks after your domain name, otherwise some messages can land in the customer's spam folder. That is a one time job and worth doing, because it makes your emails look like they genuinely come from your agency. The best next step is to make a test booking, send the confirmation and invoice to yourself, and then tell us which lines you want changed and whether you want the emails going out under your own web address.

Question 8

Can my customers see on a map where a hotel actually is before they book it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your customers can see a hotel on a map before they book. Hotel booking APIs normally send a location for each property along with the name, address and photos, so your portal can place a pin on a map and show the streets around it. Depending on how your portal is set up, customers can switch from the normal list of results to a map view and tap a pin to see the rate for that property, which helps a lot when someone cares more about being near a beach, a station or a conference venue than about the hotel itself. How accurate the pin is depends on the supplier. Chain hotels in big cities are usually mapped very precisely, because that data has been checked over and over by many people. Smaller guesthouses, apartments and properties in rural areas are sometimes placed on the nearest main road or town centre rather than the exact front door, and now and then a property sits a little away from where the pin appears. The written address that comes with the booking is usually the more reliable of the two, so it is worth showing both to your customer. Distances to landmarks, like how far the hotel is from the airport or the old town, are a separate matter. Some suppliers send a list of nearby places with distances and some send nothing at all, so you will see this on certain hotels and not on others. We prefer to display it only where the supplier provides it, because a made up distance creates far more complaints than a missing one. If map view matters to the way you sell, tell us which destinations you work in most often so we can check how well your connected suppliers map those areas and decide whether the map should sit beside your search results or inside each hotel page.

Question 9

Can my white label portal be shown in another language for customers who do not read English?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it can, though how complete the translation looks depends on where the words come from. The parts of the portal we control, such as the menus, buttons, search labels, checkout steps and the confirmation emails and vouchers, can be set up in other languages so a customer can go through the whole booking without seeing English. The part to be realistic about is the content that arrives from your suppliers. Hotel descriptions, room names, cancellation wording, airline fare conditions and tour itineraries are sent to us by the hotel and flight systems you are connected to, and we pass through whatever they give us. Some suppliers provide that content in several languages and some only in English, so you may end up with a portal in your customer's language but a hotel description still in English. That is a supplier limit, not something we can translate reliably on their behalf, because getting cancellation or fare wording slightly wrong in a translation causes real problems later. Languages that read right to left usually need a little extra layout work on the pages, and the number of languages you can switch between may depend on your plan, so it is worth raising early rather than after your site is live. Write down the languages your customers actually need and send them to us with the suppliers you want connected, and we will tell you which of those suppliers return content in those languages before you commit to anything.

Question 10

Can my customers search for a family room for two adults and two children, or does the portal only handle two people in a room?

Accepted Answer

Yes, hotel searches on your portal can handle families, not just two adults in one room. The search form lets you set how many adults and how many children are travelling, and it asks for the age of each child, because age is what decides whether a child sleeps free, needs an extra bed, or counts as an adult. You can also search for more than one room at a time, so a family travelling with grandparents can be priced as two or three rooms in the same booking. The important thing to know is that the rules come from the hotel and the supplier, not from the portal. Each room type has a maximum number of guests it will accept, so a standard double may simply not return any price for two adults and two children even when the hotel has rooms free. In that case the search will show family rooms, suites or two separate rooms instead. Child ages also matter because some hotels only offer free child stays up to a certain age, and a few suppliers are stricter than others about what they will quote for infants. Be honest with your customers about one thing: the child ages you enter at search time are what the hotel is told, and the hotel can ask for proof at check in. If the ages are wrong, the property may charge the difference locally, and that charge is between the guest and the hotel. Run a few test searches for your most popular family destinations with different child ages and see what room options come back, so you know what your connected suppliers will actually quote before you advertise family stays.