Question 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

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.

Question 7

Can my staff use the software on their phones when they are out of the office?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases they can. A modern portal is built to work in a web browser, and the pages adjust themselves to fit a smaller screen, so your staff can log in from a phone or a tablet while they are at an airport, at a client meeting or working from home. They sign in with the same username they use at the desk, so there is nothing extra to install and no separate account to keep track of. What they can actually do on a phone depends on the access level you have given them and on which parts of the system you have switched on. Searching, checking a booking, looking at a customer record and sending a voucher or a quote generally work well on a small screen. Heavier screens, like detailed sales reports or bulk uploads, are much easier on a laptop simply because there is more room to read the columns. Some features also depend on your plan and on what your suppliers allow through their systems, so it is worth checking the ones your team relies on most. One thing to think about is security. Once staff can log in from anywhere, you want to be sure the right people see the right things, especially the money side of the business. Give each person their own login rather than sharing one, and remove access quickly when someone leaves. Before you rely on it, ask one of your staff to log in from their own phone and run through the two or three tasks they do most often, so you know exactly what works away from the desk.

Question 8

Will the special requests my customers make, like a late check in or two rooms next to each other, actually reach the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can collect special requests when the booking is made and pass them on with the reservation, but whether the hotel acts on them is never guaranteed. This is the one part of hotel booking that stays outside anyone's control, so it is worth understanding before you promise anything to a customer. On the booking page your staff or your customer can usually add requests, either as free text or as set choices such as a twin bed instead of a double, a non smoking room, a high floor, rooms close together, or an expected late arrival. Those details travel with the booking to the supplier, and from the supplier to the hotel. How far they get depends on the supplier you are connected to. Some send the notes straight through and print them on the voucher, some only accept a short amount of text, and some do not carry requests at all on certain rate types. If you work with several hotel suppliers, you may find one handles this better than another. It also helps to know which things are really a request and which are part of the booking. Bed type, adjoining rooms, early check in and room location are almost always requests that the hotel decides on the day, based on what is free when your customer walks in. An expected late arrival is still well worth sending, because hotels can release a room if nobody turns up and no arrival time was given. For anything a customer truly depends on, such as a wheelchair accessible room, a cot or a connecting door for young children, treat it as something to confirm directly with the hotel rather than leave as a note. Before you go live, make a test booking through each of your hotel suppliers and see exactly where your request text appears on the confirmation and the voucher, then word your own booking page so customers know a request is not a promise.

Question 9

Can I connect more than one flight supplier to my portal so my customers always see the cheapest fare?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can connect more than one flight supplier to your portal, and the search can run across all of them at once so the cheapest option shows near the top of the results. Most agencies start with a single connection and add others as they grow, which is usually the sensible way to do it. Each supplier is a separate connection, so you will need your own account and credentials with each one before it can be switched on. That part sits with the supplier rather than with us, and some of them will want to see a little trading history or a licence before they give you live access. Whether you can run several connections at the same time also depends on the plan you are on, so it is worth confirming that before you sign agreements with a long list of suppliers. There are a couple of honest limits. Searching more suppliers takes a little longer, because your portal has to wait for the slowest one to answer before it can show a complete list. The same flight can also come back from two different suppliers, sometimes with different baggage allowances or change conditions, so the cheapest result is not always the best one for your customer. You can usually set your own order of preference and a separate markup for each supplier, which lets you steer bookings towards the ones you earn most on or trust most. A good next step is to write down the suppliers you already hold accounts with, then ask us to confirm which of them your plan can connect and roughly how long each one takes to go live.

Question 10

Can I sell travel insurance on my portal alongside the flights and hotels?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually offer travel insurance alongside flights and hotels, so your customer picks a policy as an optional extra while they are booking instead of going somewhere else for it. How it works depends on who you buy the insurance from. If your insurance partner has an API, the portal can ask them for a live quote based on the travellers, the trip length and the destination, and the policy is issued by the insurer as soon as your customer pays. If your partner has no API, the simpler route is to offer a set of fixed plans as an add on at checkout, take the money with the booking, and then issue the policy through your insurer's own system afterwards. That second way needs a little manual work, but it still puts insurance in front of every customer. There are limits worth knowing. The cover, the wording and the policy documents all come from the insurer, not from the portal, and any claim is settled between your customer and the insurer. What you earn is whatever your agreement with the insurer says. In many countries you also need some form of permission or registration to sell insurance, or you have to sell as an appointed agent of a licensed insurer, so that part comes down to your local rules rather than the software. The next step is to ask your insurance partner whether they offer an API or an agent login, and to check what you are allowed to sell in your own market, then come back to us with that and we can look at the best way to add it to your portal.