Question 1

Can I manage two branch offices in the same travel agency software and keep their bookings separate?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software can handle more than one branch in a single account and keep each branch's bookings separate. The usual setup is one main account that you control, with each office set up underneath it as its own unit. Staff are attached to a branch, so when they log in they see the bookings their own office made rather than the other office's work. How strictly the two are kept apart depends on how the software is set up and on your plan. In many cases you as the owner can see everything across both offices, a branch manager sees only their own office, and a counter staff member sees only the bookings they made themselves. Some plans also let each branch have its own markup rules, its own invoice layout and its own set of suppliers, so one office can sell something the other does not. Those finer controls are not always part of an entry level plan, so it is worth asking before you commit. There are limits worth being honest about. If your two offices are separate legal companies with different bank accounts and different trade licences, you may be better off with two separate accounts instead of two branches inside one, because payment settlement and accounting usually sit at the account level rather than the branch level. Combined reporting across branches is normally possible, but the exact breakdown you get depends on what the software records at the time of booking. Before you decide, write down what each office must be able to see and do on its own and what you want to see combined in one place, then check that list against what the software actually allows.

Question 2

Can I add a wheelchair or special assistance request for a passenger when I book a flight through your API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can add a special assistance request at the time of booking through our flight API. The request is attached to the passenger record and sent to the airline along with the name and flight details, so your staff do not have to call the airline separately for every booking. The important thing to understand is that sending the request is not the same as having it confirmed. Most airlines accept the request first and confirm it afterwards, sometimes straight away and sometimes after a review. Wheelchair assistance also comes in different categories, depending on whether the passenger can walk a short distance, manage steps, or needs to stay seated throughout, so your staff should choose the one that actually matches the passenger rather than picking any wheelchair option. Needs such as an assistance dog, oxygen on board, or a passenger travelling with a carer are treated differently by each airline and some of them ask for a medical form or a direct call before they will agree. Low cost carriers and some content sources are more limited. A few accept only a short list of standard requests, a few expect you to arrange assistance on their own site or with their call centre, and some charge for certain equipment. Where an airline does not accept the request through the API at all, we cannot pass it on for you, and your team will need to contact the carrier directly using the airline reference. When you book, add the request, keep a note of it on the booking, and check with the airline a few days before departure that it has been confirmed.

Question 3

Can I book a hotel room for a family with young children and get the right price for their ages?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. A hotel booking API lets you search with the number of adults and the age of each child travelling, and the room rates that come back should already allow for the children sharing the room where the property permits it. That means the price your customer sees in the search is the price for the whole family, not an adults only rate that you then have to adjust by hand. How far this goes depends on the supplier and on the individual hotel. Some properties let a young child stay free when sharing an existing bed, some charge a set amount per child, and some only accept a limited number of people in a room no matter their age. A few room types do not take children at all. Because of that, two hotels in the same city can answer the same family search in very different ways, and the API can only pass on what the hotel has filed. It also matters that the ages are entered accurately, because the hotel checks them at check in. If a child is older than what was booked, the property can ask the guest to pay the difference on arrival, and that is awkward for you to explain afterwards. Watch too for charges the hotel collects locally, such as a children's breakfast or a resort fee, as these sit in the room conditions rather than in the headline price. Before you go live, run a few test searches with real family combinations and read the room conditions on the results, so your staff know what to confirm with the customer at the time of booking.

Question 4

Can I see which of my staff made each booking so I can work out their commission at the end of the month?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. When each member of your team has their own login rather than everyone sharing one, the software stamps every booking with the name of the person who created it, along with the date and time. That means you can open a booking months later and still see who handled it, and you can filter or sort your booking list by staff member to see what each person sold over a chosen period. Whether the software then works out the commission for you is a different matter, and it depends on your plan and how your agency pays people. Some setups let you define a rule, such as a share of the markup or the profit on each sale, and the system totals it up per person. Others simply give you the sales figures per staff member and you apply your own commission rules outside the system, often in a spreadsheet. If commission is paid differently for flights, hotels and packages, or changes when someone hits a target, it is worth describing your exact rules to us before you assume the software can automate them. There are two things that commonly break this. The first is shared logins, because then every sale looks like it came from the same person. The second is bookings that are changed or taken over by someone else partway through, where you may want credit to sit with the original seller rather than whoever touched it last, and that is a policy decision you need to make. The next step is to decide how you want commission counted, then give every staff member their own login from day one so the history is there when you need it.

Question 5

Will the money from bookings on my white label travel portal come straight into my own bank account?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups the money from bookings on your white label portal reaches your own account, because the portal is connected to a payment gateway that is registered in your business name rather than ours. In practice that means you open a merchant account with a gateway or with your bank, and we connect that account to the booking pages on your portal. Your customer pays on your site, the charge is processed by your own gateway, and the funds settle into your bank account on whatever cycle your gateway uses. Your business name is what the customer sees on their card statement, so nothing on the payment page or the receipt points them somewhere else. There are a few honest limits. Which gateways can be connected depends on what your plan covers and on which providers are available in your country, so it is worth checking before you commit to one. The gateway, not us, decides whether to approve you, and new merchants are sometimes asked for extra documents or have settlement held back for a while at the start. Paying your suppliers is a separate matter from collecting from your customer, because some suppliers want a card at the moment of booking while others work from a deposit or a credit account you top up, and that affects how much working capital you need to keep aside. Before you launch, ask your bank or preferred gateway what they need from you to approve a travel business, and let us know which gateway you are going with so we can confirm it can be connected to your portal.

Question 6

Will the hotel price my customer sees in the search include all the taxes and local fees, or will they get a surprise at the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Mostly yes, but not every charge is included, and how much detail you get depends on the hotel and the supplier behind the rate. The headline price in a search result normally covers the room and the taxes the supplier collects at the time of booking. What it often does not cover is the extra money some properties charge guests directly at check in or check out. Those direct charges go by different names, such as city tax, tourist tax, resort fee, destination fee or parking. They are set by the hotel or the local authority, not by us, and the supplier passes them along as information rather than collecting them. Our API hands you whatever the supplier sends, so if a charge is marked as payable at the property, you can show it on the room page and on the voucher before your customer commits. The honest limit is that suppliers are not consistent about this. Some send these charges as clear separate amounts you can display neatly, and some send them only as a line of free text in the room description, which means you can show the wording but not add it to a total. Local taxes also change from time to time, and a hotel can introduce a fee faster than it appears in supplier data. So you can reduce surprises a great deal, but you cannot promise a figure is final in every case. Before you go live, run test searches on a few hotels in the cities you sell most and see how the charge information comes through, then make sure that wording appears on your booking page and your voucher so your customer reads it in advance.

Question 7

Can I sell a multi city trip through your flight booking API, like London to Dubai then Dubai to Delhi then home?

Accepted Answer

Yes, multi city trips can be searched and booked through a flight booking API, though how tidily the results come back depends on the airlines and the suppliers behind your search. Most full service carriers are happy to price several legs as one single itinerary, so your customer gets one booking reference and one ticket covering the whole journey. There is usually a limit on how many legs one search can carry, and some combinations of airlines simply cannot be sold together because the carriers have no agreement with each other. Low cost airlines generally do not work this way at all, so when they appear in a multi city result the itinerary is often put together from separate one way fares rather than sold as a single ticket. That difference matters more than it first looks. On one single ticket the airline carries the responsibility if a delay on an early leg makes your customer miss a later one, and baggage can often be checked through. On separate tickets each leg stands on its own, so changes and refunds are handled leg by leg, and your customer may need to collect their bags and check in again along the way. It is worth telling them which kind of booking they are buying before they pay, because it changes what happens if something goes wrong. The practical next step is to run a few test searches on the routes you sell most, see whether the results come back as one ticket or several, and check with us which multi city options your plan and your current supplier mix will support.

Question 8

Can I show hotel prices in my customer's own currency on my site?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can normally display hotel prices in your customer's own currency, but how cleanly it works depends on the supplier behind each hotel and on what your plan allows. Most hotel suppliers return a rate in the currency they contract in, which may be the hotel's local currency or their own trading currency. The booking platform then converts that into the currency you want to show, using a rate you set yourself or one that is kept updated for you. Because of this, the amount your customer sees is a converted display price rather than the supplier's own figure, and you can usually build in a small buffer so that normal movements in the exchange rate do not eat into your margin. There are limits worth knowing before you promise anything. Some suppliers will only quote and settle in one currency, so you can show another currency on screen but you will still be invoiced in theirs. If the room is paid at the hotel instead of on your site, the hotel charges in its own local currency at check out, so what your customer actually pays can differ slightly from what they saw when they booked. Card networks also apply their own conversion when the customer's card is held in another currency, and that part sits outside both your control and ours. Check with us which currencies your connected suppliers quote and settle in, then decide which currencies to offer on your site and make sure your booking terms explain that converted amounts are a guide and the local currency charge is the one that applies.

Question 9

Can I add an extra bag or a meal for my customer after I have already issued their ticket?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases you can, but it depends on the airline and the supplier the ticket was booked through. Some airlines let you add extra bags, seats and meals after ticketing through the same connection you used to book, and where that is supported the software shows you what is available and what it will cost before you confirm. Others sell those extras only at the time of booking, or only on their own website and at the airport, and no API can change that. The honest position is that extras after ticketing are one of the less consistent parts of flight content. Full service airlines and low cost airlines handle them very differently, and two airlines on the same connection can behave in opposite ways. Treat it as something you check on each booking rather than a feature you can count on every time. Where an extra can be added, the charge is normally collected the same way as the original booking, and the new bag or meal is written into the booking record so it shows on the documents you send your customer. Where it cannot, your options are to send the customer to the airline directly or let them pay at the airport, which is usually dearer for them and leaves you out of the loop. A sensible next step is to list the airlines your customers fly most often and ask us to confirm which of those allow extras to be added after ticketing on your setup, and in the meantime have your staff offer bags and meals at the point of sale, while you know for certain the option is there.

Question 10

Can the software save my regular customers' passport and frequent flyer details so my staff don't have to type them in every time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can keep a saved profile for a regular customer and pull those details straight into a new booking instead of typing them out again. A customer profile usually holds the things you repeat on every trip, such as the name exactly as it appears on the passport, date of birth, nationality, passport number and expiry date, contact details, loyalty or frequent flyer numbers, and simple preferences like a window seat or a special meal. When your staff start a booking for that customer, they pick the profile and the fields fill themselves, which cuts down on typing mistakes in names, the kind that are slow and expensive to correct later. Exactly which fields you get, and whether you can store more than one traveller under a single customer, depends on your plan and how your portal has been set up. There are honest limits worth knowing. A saved frequent flyer number will only be attached to the ticket if the airline or supplier accepts it for that fare and route, and some suppliers simply pass seat or meal notes along as a request rather than a guarantee. Saved details also go stale, passports expire and people change phone numbers, so a stored profile should never replace a quick check against the real document at the time of booking. You are also holding personal data, so it should sit behind proper logins rather than in a shared spreadsheet. Before you rely on it, ask which profile fields are available on your plan, decide which of your staff should be allowed to view stored passport details, and agree a simple habit of confirming passport expiry with the traveller on every new booking.