Question 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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.

Question 6

Can I record the bookings I make over the phone or offline in the same software, so everything sits in one place?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can. Travel agency software is usually built on the understanding that not everything comes through a portal, so there is normally a way to create a booking by hand for the trips you arrange over the phone, by email or face to face. Once it is saved, it sits in the same booking list as the ones your website produced, and the customer record shows the whole history together. The way it works is that you pick the type of service, such as a flight, a hotel, a transfer or something you have put together yourself, then type in the supplier, the passenger names, the travel dates, what you paid, what you charged and the supplier's confirmation reference. From there the booking can usually flow into your invoices, vouchers and sales reports just like an online one, so your month end totals cover everything your agency sold rather than only the automated part. There are honest limits worth knowing. A manual booking only holds what you type into it, so it will not update itself if the supplier changes something, and it cannot warn you about a cancellation deadline unless you record that date yourself. Which service types you can choose from, and whether you can bring older bookings in from a spreadsheet instead of typing them again, depends on your plan and on how your account has been set up. The next thing to do is write down the kinds of offline business you handle most often, including anything unusual such as visas or rail, and check that each one can be recorded the way you need before you move your records across.

Question 7

Can I set up my portal to show only the destinations I actually sell instead of the whole world?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can narrow your portal down to the destinations you really sell, although how tightly it can be locked down depends on your plan and on the suppliers sitting behind the search. The usual way this works is with a destination list that you control. That list drives the suggestions in the search box, the featured destinations on the homepage and the places your customers can pick from, so if you only sell a handful of countries or a few resort areas, those are the only names that come up when someone starts typing. You can normally also arrange the search so that a request outside your list returns a short message inviting the customer to contact your team, rather than an empty results page that looks broken. Be aware of two honest limits. Some suppliers send back their whole inventory and the filtering happens on the portal side, so a very determined visitor who edits a link or arrives from a search engine on an older page may still reach a destination you did not mean to sell. The other thing worth thinking about is that a narrow list also narrows the pages search engines can find, and it means a loyal customer asking for somewhere new has to phone you instead of booking online, so many agencies keep a wider list live and simply promote their core destinations on the front page. The sensible next step is to write down the countries, cities or regions you want on your portal at launch, note which of them your contracted and API suppliers actually cover, and ask our team to set the list up and show it to you on a test link before you go live.

Question 8

Will I know if breakfast is included in a hotel rate before my customer books it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will. Rates that come through a hotel booking API usually carry a board basis along with the price, such as room only, bed and breakfast, half board, or all inclusive, and your portal can show that on the search results and again on the room choice page so your customer sees it before they pay. How clearly it reads does depend on the supplier sending the rate. Some suppliers send a tidy standard board code that we can display the same way every time. Others put it inside the room name as plain text, so it may read as a double room with breakfast included rather than appearing as a neat label. And sometimes breakfast is not part of the rate at all but is offered as an extra that the guest pays at the hotel. Where a supplier does not send the information, your portal can only show what it receives, so the room description is always worth a read. It is also worth knowing that meal arrangements can have conditions the rate line does not spell out, like breakfast being included for some guests in the room and not others, or children being charged separately at the restaurant. The hotel's own terms are what applies on the day, so the safest habit is to pass the board basis through onto the voucher and the invoice your customer receives, which gives them something in writing to show at check in. Run a few test searches across the suppliers you have connected and see how the board basis is appearing for you, and let us know if you want it added as a search filter or printed more prominently on your vouchers.

Question 9

If I sell to customers in other countries, can my portal show prices in their own currency?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can show prices in more than one currency, but it helps to understand the difference between what your customer sees on screen and what their card is actually charged. Most flight and hotel suppliers return fares in their own currency, so the portal converts that into the currency your customer is browsing in. You decide which currencies to offer, and you can usually add a small buffer to the conversion so that a movement in the exchange rate does not eat into your margin. Those rates refresh on a schedule rather than second by second, so a published rate can be slightly behind the live market. The actual charge depends on your payment provider, not on the portal. Some gateways can accept payment in several currencies and settle everything into one account for you, while others only charge in a single currency and let the customer's own bank do the conversion. That second arrangement still works fine, but your customer may see a slightly different amount on their statement than the one shown at checkout, and they may pay their bank's conversion fee. It is worth deciding which approach you want before you start advertising abroad. Refunds follow the same path. Money normally comes back in the currency it was taken in, so if rates have moved since the booking, a refunded amount can differ a little from what was originally paid. That is how card networks and banks handle it rather than something we control, so it is better to explain it to your customer upfront than to be surprised later. The practical next step is to list the countries you plan to sell to, then ask your payment provider which currencies it can accept and settle into your account, and share that with us so we can set up the display currencies and conversion buffer to match.

Question 10

Can I sell a flight and hotel together as one package on my portal, or does my customer have to book them separately?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can sell them together as one package, provided you have both a flight supplier and a hotel supplier connected to your portal and package selling is included in your plan. It is not something that works on its own, so it is worth confirming before you build your pricing around it. When it is switched on, your customer searches once for a destination and dates and sees a combined price for the flight and the hotel together, rather than two separate results. They pay once, you send one invoice, and you can decide how much markup sits on the package as a whole instead of pricing each part by hand. For many agencies this is the main reason to sell packages, because a single combined price is harder for a customer to compare against an airline website. What you should understand is that behind the scenes these are still two separate bookings with two separate suppliers, and each one keeps its own rules. The flight may be non refundable while the hotel still has free cancellation, so a change or a cancellation has to be handled part by part, and the refund your customer gets back will reflect whichever rules apply to each piece. If one of the two components sells out between searching and paying, the booking will not go through as a package and you will need to requote. Also be aware that selling a flight and a hotel together can count as selling a holiday package under consumer rules in some countries, which brings extra obligations on you as the seller. Check with your own advisor on that point, and then ask us to confirm whether package search is available on your plan and with the suppliers you already have connected.