Question 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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.

Question 6

Can I put together a quote for a customer who is still thinking about it, and turn it into a booking if they say yes?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can build a quote for a customer who has not decided yet, save it against their name, and turn it into a booking later without typing all the details again. This is one of the most used parts of agency software, because very few customers book on the first conversation. The usual way it works is that you search as normal, pick the flight, hotel or package options you want to offer, and save them as a quote instead of booking. You can often hold two or three choices side by side so the customer can compare, add your own notes and terms, and send the whole thing out as a document or a link carrying your agency name and logo. The quote stays in the system under that customer, so when they call back you open it rather than starting again. The honest limit is that a quote does not hold the seats, rooms or the fare. It records what was available at the moment you made it. When your customer agrees, the software goes back to the supplier for live availability and the price may have moved up or down, or the option may have gone. How smoothly the quote turns into a booking also depends on the supplier and on what is included in your plan. Some connections let you refresh a saved quote in one step, while others need a fresh search before you can confirm. It is worth asking us which quoting features are active on your plan, and getting into the habit of putting a validity date on every quote you send so your customer knows the price needs rechecking before payment.

Question 7

If my customers want hotels in small towns and not just the big cities, will a hotel booking API actually have them?

Accepted Answer

Usually yes, but not always, and it depends on the supplier behind the API rather than on the portal itself. Most hotel suppliers hold very wide inventory that goes well beyond capital cities and tourist resorts, so searches for regional towns, business districts and smaller holiday spots normally return something. Where coverage thins out is in genuinely remote places, in small family run guest houses, and in homestays or serviced apartments that have never signed up with any wholesaler. If a property is not contracted anywhere upstream, no API can invent it for you. The practical fix is to not rely on a single source. When your portal is connected to more than one hotel supplier, the gaps rarely line up, so a town that is thin with one supplier is often well covered by another, and your customers see a fuller list without knowing anything changed. Beyond that, you can load your own directly contracted properties into the portal so the small hotels you personally deal with sit in the results alongside supplier inventory. That is how most agencies cover their home region properly, because they know those hotels better than any wholesaler does. How many suppliers you can connect, and which ones are available to you, depends on your plan and on your own contracting status with those suppliers, so it is worth asking before you commit to a particular setup. Some suppliers also restrict certain markets or require you to sell only in agreed countries. Before you go live, make a short list of the towns your customers ask for most often and run live test searches on each one, then tell us where the results look thin so we can look at which supplier mix would fill those gaps.

Question 8

Can I stop my staff from seeing certain things in the software, like how much profit I make on each booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. Travel agency software is normally built with staff roles, so the person who owns the agency does not have to give everyone the same view. You can usually create a login for a consultant that lets them search, quote and book, while the cost price, the markup and the margin column stay hidden. The same idea applies to refunds, cancellations, markup settings and the sales reports, which many agencies choose to keep for owners and managers only. How fine that control gets depends on your plan and on how the portal has been set up for you. Some setups give you a short list of ready made roles, such as consultant, accountant and administrator, and you simply pick one for each person. Others let you switch individual permissions on and off for each member of staff. It is worth asking which of the two you have before you promise someone that they will never see a particular screen. There is one honest limit to keep in mind. Hiding the margin stops casual viewing, but it does not change what a supplier shows. If a staff member can open a supplier voucher, a ticket or a confirmation email that carries the net amount, they may still work the cost out from there. Agencies that care a lot about this usually combine the role settings with a clear rule about who is allowed to download supplier documents. A good next step is to write down the handful of screens you would rather your team did not reach, then ask us to go through your current roles with you and show which of those can be locked down on your plan.

Question 9

If something goes wrong with a booking on my portal in the middle of the night, do my customers contact me or do they contact you?

Accepted Answer

They contact you, not us. A white label portal carries your brand from the first page to the confirmation email, so your travellers will never see any sign that another company is behind the technology. That is the point of white label, and it means you stay the face of the business for every question a customer has, at any hour. We sit behind you and support your team, not your travellers. It helps to separate two kinds of problems. If the portal itself is misbehaving, for example searches will not load or a payment page will not complete, that is something to raise with us and we will look into it. If the issue is with the booking, for example a hotel says it has no record of the reservation or an airline has moved a flight, that is a supplier matter. We can help you chase it and tell you what the supplier has sent back, but the final answer comes from the airline or the hotel chain, and sometimes that takes longer than anyone would like. How quickly we respond, and whether cover runs through nights and weekends, depends on the support arrangement in your plan. Urgent faults that stop bookings going through are normally handled differently from general questions, so it is worth knowing in advance which category your problem falls into. Before you go live, check what support hours your plan includes, and set up your own out of hours arrangement for travellers, even if it is just a mobile number on your confirmation emails and a note telling staff to keep the booking reference handy.

Question 10

Why do some flights show in my search results but then say they are not available when I try to book them?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this happens to almost every agency that sells live flights, and it does not mean something is broken in your portal. When your customer searches, the results come back from the airlines and suppliers connected to your search, and they show what was on sale at that moment. Seats at any one fare are limited, sometimes to only a few, so by the time you reach the booking screen that particular fare may already be taken by another agent or another website somewhere in the world. Before a ticket is issued, the airline is asked again to confirm the fare and the seats. If anything has changed, the booking stops instead of going through at a fare the airline will not honour. That check works in your favour, because a ticket issued against a fare that no longer exists usually comes back to the agency later as a debit memo or a shortfall you have to cover yourself. How often you see it depends on the route, the season and the supplier behind that fare, so the cheapest fares on busy routes tend to disappear the fastest. There is no way to remove this completely, because no system can reserve a seat for a customer who is only browsing. What helps is treating a search result as an indication rather than a promise, running a fresh search just before you take payment, and telling your customer plainly that the fare is only secured once the booking is confirmed and the deadline for payment is met. If you notice the same fares failing again and again rather than now and then, make a note of the route and the dates and raise it with us, so we can check which connection those results are coming from.