Question 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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.

Question 5

Can my sub agents get their own branded login on my portal so their customers never see my agency name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this is normally possible, and it is one of the more popular ways agencies grow with a white label portal. Instead of every sub agent logging into something that carries your branding, each one can be set up with their own look, their own logo and their own portal address, so the travellers they deal with only ever see the sub agent's name. Behind the scenes it is still your portal, your supplier connections and your account. In practice you stay the account holder and keep control of the things that matter to you. You decide which suppliers each sub agent can sell, what your own margin is, and what they are allowed to do. The sub agent then adds their own markup on top of the rate you give them, and their customer sees only the final price. Every booking made through those branded logins still lands in your back office, so you can see the whole picture in one place. There are limits worth knowing about. How many separate sub brands you can run, and whether each can sit on its own domain name, usually depends on the plan you are on, and putting a sub agent on their own domain means they have to point that domain to the portal first. Some suppliers also insist that their own terms or name appear somewhere on booking documents, so a small amount of wording may not be removable. Who collects the customer's money also depends on how your payment setup is arranged. If this is the direction you want to go, ask us how many branded sub agent logins your plan covers and whether their vouchers and invoices can carry their own logo rather than yours.

Question 6

Can I set my own markup on flight fares so I decide how much I make on each booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can set your own markup on flight fares and decide how much you earn on each booking. The portal takes the fare that comes back from the airline or supplier, adds your markup, and shows your customer one total price, so they never see the fare you paid underneath. Most setups let you build markup rules rather than one flat figure for everything. You can usually vary the markup by airline, by route, by cabin class, by whether the trip is domestic or international, and by which part of your business the booking came from, so your walk in customers and your sub agents are not treated the same. The markup is normally either a fixed amount per passenger or a percentage of the fare, and you can change it yourself when you need to. There are real limits, and they depend on the supplier and the type of fare. Some content reaches you net, which leaves the pricing entirely to you, while other fares already carry a commission and behave differently. Taxes and airline fees are usually passed straight through without a markup, and some airlines set conditions about how their fares may be displayed and sold, so your room to move changes from one source to another. Your plan can also affect how detailed the rules are allowed to get. The next thing to do is list the routes and airlines you sell most often, decide what you want to earn on each, then run a few test searches and check the result against the supplier fare to confirm the markup is landing where you expect.

Question 7

Can I load my own directly contracted hotels into the software so they show up next to the ones from my suppliers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can load your own contracted hotels into the software and have them appear in search results alongside the properties coming from your connected suppliers. You create the hotel record yourself, add the room types, the seasons and rates you agreed with the hotel, the allocation you have been given, the cancellation rules, and the photos and description. From then on it behaves like any other property on your portal, except that a booking draws down your own allocation instead of being sent off to a third party supplier. How much detail you can load depends on your plan and on how complicated your contract is. Straightforward season based rates with a few room types are easy. Contracts with unusual conditions, long lists of special offers, stay and pay rules or complex child pricing sometimes do not fit neatly into a standard rate structure, and in that case we would look at it with you and either map it as closely as possible or tell you honestly that part of it has to be handled manually. The first loading is often done with help from our side so you can see how it is set up, after which your staff can add and update properties themselves. You also get some control over how these hotels are treated. You can set your own markup on them separately from your supplier markup, and in many setups you can choose to have your contracted properties appear above the supplier results, since the margin is usually better for you. You can decide whether a booking confirms immediately against your allocation or comes through as a request so you can check with the hotel first. If this matters to you, send us one of your hotel contracts before you commit so we can tell you exactly how its rates and conditions would sit in the software.

Question 8

If my customer wants to change the dates on a hotel they already booked, can I do that on the portal or do I have to cancel and rebook?

Accepted Answer

In most cases you will need to cancel and rebook rather than edit the dates, because very few hotel suppliers allow a booking to be amended once it is confirmed. A hotel reservation is priced for the exact nights, room type and guest count you sent at the time of booking. When any of that changes, the supplier treats it as a different booking, so the portal has to release the original one and create a new one at whatever rate is available on the new dates. Whether that is simple or painful depends entirely on the cancellation terms of the original booking. If the rate is refundable and you are still inside the free cancellation window, you can cancel, get the money back and rebook with very little fuss, although the new dates may cost more or less than the old ones. If the rate is non refundable, or the deadline has passed, cancelling means your customer loses what they paid, so it is usually worth contacting the supplier or the hotel directly to ask for goodwill before you cancel anything. A small number of suppliers do support amendments through their API, and where that is the case the portal can pass the change through for you instead of forcing a cancel and rebook. This varies from one supplier connection to another, so it is not something we can promise across the board, and some changes such as correcting a guest name are more often accepted than a change of dates. Before you cancel, open the booking on your portal and check the cancellation deadline and the rate terms, then look at the price on the new dates so you can tell your customer exactly what the change will cost them.

Question 9

Can I book flights for children and infants on my portal, or does it only handle adults?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can book children and infants on the same flight as the adults travelling with them, without leaving your portal. The search panel lets you say how many adults, children and infants you are booking for before you run the search, and the results come back with fares that apply to each passenger type rather than an adult fare repeated. Airlines usually work out child and infant fares by age on the date of travel, not the date of booking, so the portal will ask for a date of birth for each young passenger. Infants are normally handled in one of two ways, either sitting on an adult's lap or occupying their own seat, and that choice affects both the fare and the baggage allowance. Which option you see depends on the airline and on the content source the fare comes from, so one airline may offer both and another only one. There are limits worth knowing. Airlines cap how many infants one adult can travel with, and some cap how many passengers can sit on a single booking, so a very large family may need to be split across two bookings. Children travelling alone as unaccompanied minors are usually not something airlines allow through any online booking flow, because the airline needs to register the service and record who is dropping off and collecting the child, so those normally have to go to the airline directly. Before you quote a family fare, run a test search with the exact ages and read what the fare rules and baggage lines say for each passenger, and if something looks wrong for a particular airline, send us the search details so we can check how that airline's content is coming through.

Question 10

If I stop using your white label portal one day, do I keep my website and my customer records?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your domain name and your own customer and booking records stay with you, although the portal software itself is something you are licensed to use rather than something you own outright. That distinction matters, so it is worth understanding before you sign up rather than afterwards. In practical terms, if the domain is registered in your own name, you can point it at a different website whenever you choose and nobody else can take it from you. Your customer details, past bookings and invoices can normally be exported into a spreadsheet file that you can keep or load into other software. The sensible thing is to take that export while your account is still active, because once an account is closed the data may no longer be reachable. What does not travel with you is the portal itself. The search, booking and supplier connections run through the platform, so when the portal stops, live searching and new bookings stop with it. Any bookings already made and not yet travelled need a plan agreed in advance, which usually means a notice period or servicing those bookings directly with the supplier. The text, images and logo you added are yours to reuse, but the underlying layout and booking engine are not. How much notice you get, and how long records are kept after closing, depend on your plan and your agreement. Before you commit, check who the domain is registered to, ask what the notice period is, confirm that you can export your bookings and customers at any time, and get the position on in progress bookings written down.