Question 1

If I want to change the look of my portal later, like the colours and the homepage pictures, can I do that myself or do I have to ask you every time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most of the everyday changes to how your portal looks are things you can do yourself from the admin area, without waiting on us. The usual self service items are your logo, your colour scheme, the main homepage banner images, the welcome text, your contact details in the header and footer, and simple content pages such as an about us page or a terms page. You make the change, save it, and it shows on the live site. Bigger changes are a different matter. If you want a completely new page layout, the search box moved somewhere else, a new section built from scratch, or something that behaves differently from the standard design, that is design work rather than a settings change, and our team would need to do it for you. How much of that is included depends on your plan, so it is worth asking before you promise a redesign to anyone. There is also content you cannot edit freely, and it is honest to say so upfront. Hotel photos, room descriptions, airline names and fare rules come through from the suppliers you are connected to, so those are controlled by the supplier feed rather than by your settings. You can usually change how that content is presented, but not rewrite the content itself. Before you settle on a design, ask us for a walkthrough of the branding section of your admin area so you can see exactly which items you can change on your own and which ones would need to come to us.

Question 2

Can the software send my customers a reminder before they travel so I do not have to remember to do it myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it can. Reminder messages are usually handled by automatic email templates that are linked to the travel date on each booking. You set up the wording once, choose how far ahead of departure it should go out, and the system sends it on its own using the details already held against that booking, such as the passenger name, the hotel or flight, and the dates. The message goes out under your own agency name and branding, so your customer sees it as coming from you. The reminder can only use information that is actually in the system, so bookings you made over the phone or direct with a supplier need to be entered into the software first, otherwise no reminder will be created for them. It also helps to keep customer email addresses accurate, because a message sent to an old address will simply fail quietly. Some automatic emails can land in a customer's spam folder, which is worth testing with your own address before you rely on it for every booking. Text message or messaging app reminders are a different matter. Those usually need a separate messaging account of your own, and whether they are included depends on your plan and on which messaging service you want to use, so that is something to confirm rather than assume. Reminders are also not the same thing as supplier change alerts, which work separately. The best next step is to check which automatic emails your plan includes, then send yourself a test booking reminder so you can see the wording and timing before your customers do.

Question 3

Is there a way to see how much my agency has sold in a month without me adding up every booking by hand?

Accepted Answer

Yes, there is. The software keeps a record of every booking made through your portal, and there is a reports area where you choose a date range and see the totals worked out for you. Most agencies look at it at the end of each month, but you can set any dates you like, such as a single week or a whole season, and come back to the same figures later. In most cases you can also break the totals down rather than just seeing one number. Common breakdowns are by product, so flights separately from hotels, by the staff member or sub agent who made the booking, by supplier, and by destination. If your supplier connections pass through your cost as well as the selling price, the reports can show your margin too. Where a supplier only returns a selling price, the margin side of the report will not be reliable for those bookings, so it is worth knowing which of your suppliers give you cost information. There are honest limits to be aware of. Reports can only show what is actually in the system, so bookings you took over the phone or arranged direct with a hotel will be missing unless you enter them. How cancellations and refunds appear depends on how they were recorded, and how much detail you get can also depend on your plan. Reporting is useful for seeing your sales activity, but it is not the same as your accounts, because money actually received sits with your payment provider and your bank. The best way to get comfortable with it is to run a report for a short period where you already know roughly what you sold, see whether the figures match, and ask us which reports and breakdowns are included on your plan.

Question 4

Will I know if there are local taxes or resort fees my customer has to pay at the hotel, or will they only find out at check in?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will know before the booking is confirmed. Hotel suppliers usually send the charges that are payable directly at the property as part of the price breakdown in the API response, and your portal can show that separately from the amount your customer pays you online. So the room page and the checkout page can both make clear what is prepaid and what the hotel will collect at arrival, such as city or tourist tax, resort or facility fees and certain parking or wifi charges. How clearly this appears does depend on the supplier and on the individual hotel. Some suppliers send a tidy figure with a note about when it is collected and in which currency. Others send only a short block of text from the hotel, which we can display but cannot neatly separate into its own line. A small number of properties send nothing at all, and in that case your portal cannot invent the information. These charges are also set by the hotel or by the local authority, not by us or by the supplier, so they can change between the day of booking and the day of arrival. What you can control is how plainly it is presented. The payable at hotel amount can be shown on its own at checkout, repeated on the voucher so your customer has it with them at the desk, and kept out of your own markup so your margin sits only on the money you actually collect. Before you go live, run test searches on a handful of hotels in the destinations you sell most, compare how each of your suppliers returns this information, and add a short line in your own wording at checkout so nobody is surprised at the front desk.

Question 5

When a flight is booked on my portal, does the ticket get issued straight away or do I have to issue it myself?

Accepted Answer

In most cases yes, the ticket is issued automatically as soon as the payment goes through, but it does depend on the airline and on the supplier sitting behind that particular fare. There is no single answer that covers every route you will sell. The normal flow is that your customer pays, the booking request goes to the airline, and the confirmation comes back with the airline reference and the ticket number. At that point the e-ticket is ready in your portal and can be emailed to the passenger without you touching anything. Low cost airlines almost always work this way, because for them the booking and the ticket are the same thing. The exception is some full service and consolidator fares, which come back as a confirmed booking with a ticketing deadline rather than a ticket. There the issuing is a second step, and depending on how your account is set up it either happens automatically or you click to issue from the booking screen. A booking can also sit as pending if the supplier wants to recheck the fare or your payment needs review. In those cases the portal shows the status clearly, and the rule to follow is simple, do not treat a booking as done until a ticket number is showing against it. Before you go live, ask us to confirm which of your connected flight suppliers issue instantly and which ones hand back a deadline, and make sure your staff know to watch the booking status rather than assuming every paid booking is ticketed.

Question 6

Can I save my regular customers' passport and contact details in the software so I do not have to ask for them every time they book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. Travel agency software normally keeps a customer record where you store the name as it appears on the passport, date of birth, nationality, document number and expiry date, contact details and preferences such as meals or seating. Once that record exists you select the traveller when you start a new booking and the fields fill in for you, which saves a lot of retyping for corporate clients and repeat holiday customers. There are limits worth knowing before you depend on it. Some airlines and suppliers want passport information entered at the time of booking or collected again at check in, so a saved profile speeds up your work but does not always remove the step. Extras such as a reminder when a document is close to expiring, or space to upload a scanned copy of a passport or visa, depend on the plan you are on and how your portal has been set up, so please ask us rather than assume they are included. It is also your responsibility to handle this information properly. Passport numbers and dates of birth count as personal data in most countries, so you need to collect them fairly, tell customers what you are holding, keep them only as long as you genuinely need them and remove records for people who no longer travel with you. A sensible step is to use staff access levels so that only the people who actually make bookings can see full document details. The quickest way to see how much time this will really save you is to create one test profile, make a booking with it, and check which details carry through to the supplier and which ones you still have to type by hand.

Question 7

Can the price of a hotel change between my customer searching and actually paying on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it can, and that is normal in hotel distribution rather than a fault with your portal. Search results come from supplier systems that are updated constantly as rooms sell, as rates open and close, and as promotions start or finish. What your customer sees on the results page is a snapshot of that moment, so if they browse for a while, compare a few options and then come back to pay, the live rate for that room may no longer be the same. To deal with this, a hotel booking flow normally includes a recheck of the selected room just before payment is taken. If the rate or the availability has moved, your customer can be shown the updated price and asked to confirm before anything is charged, or the room can be released and the search repeated. How strictly this works depends on the supplier behind that particular hotel, because some return a short lived price guarantee once a room is selected and others do not guarantee anything until the booking is confirmed back to you. It also helps to know that cached results make searches feel faster but slightly increase the chance of a change at the payment stage, so there is a trade off between speed and accuracy that can be set differently depending on your plan and your suppliers. If this matters for your business, check with us which of your connected suppliers support a price recheck step, and get your staff used to requoting a room if a customer sits on a quote for a long time before paying.

Question 8

Can I book a large group of passengers on one flight through my portal, or do I have to contact the airline myself?

Accepted Answer

Usually no, not as a single group booking. Almost every flight supplier sets a limit on how many passengers can go into one search and one booking, and group travel sits outside that limit. Group fares are normally negotiated by the airline group desk, with their own deposit rules, name change deadlines and payment terms, and those contracts are not exposed through the booking APIs that power a portal. So for a genuinely large party, you will still be speaking to the airline or your consolidator directly. What the portal can do is handle the party as separate bookings on the same flights. You search as you normally would, book within the passenger limit the supplier allows, then repeat for the rest of the group. Each booking gets its own reference, so you keep an eye on all of them from your bookings list and the names and documents stay in one place. The catch is that seats are priced at whatever is available at the moment you book, so later bookings can land in a higher fare bucket, and the group will not be linked in the airline system. The exact passenger limit, and whether any group handling is offered at all, depends on the supplier and on what your plan includes. Low cost carriers and full service airlines behave differently here, and some consolidators will accept a group request by email even though their API will not take it. If group work is a regular part of your business, tell us which airlines and routes matter most and we can confirm what the limits are on the suppliers you are connected to before you quote a client.

Question 9

Can I take a deposit from my customer and collect the rest of the money closer to travel?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can take a deposit first and collect the balance later, but how far you can take it depends on what you are selling and on your payment gateway. The easiest case is anything where you control the inventory, such as your own hotel contracts, tour packages, holiday itineraries or bookings you have made directly with a supplier. Because you decide when the supplier needs to be paid, you can ask the customer for part of the money now and the rest before departure. Live API bookings work differently. When a flight is ticketed or a hotel is confirmed through a supplier connection, that supplier normally wants to be paid in full at the moment of confirmation, so a deposit only works there if you are willing to cover the difference yourself until the customer settles up, or if you hold the booking as a quote and only confirm it once the full amount is in. On the portal side, a part payment usually means the booking is recorded with an amount paid, an amount still owing and a due date, so you and your staff can see at a glance which files are not fully settled. Whether your customers can come back and pay the balance themselves through a link, or whether you take that second payment over the phone, depends on your gateway and on your plan, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming. Before you advertise deposits to customers, check with us which of your product types can be set up for part payment and ask your payment provider whether it supports follow up payments on the same booking.

Question 10

How long does it usually take to get my white label portal up and running after I sign up?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label portal is normally live a good deal faster than a website built from scratch, because the booking engine, the search screens and the supplier connections already exist and are simply configured for your brand. Most of the work on our side is setup rather than development. We create your portal, apply your logo, colours and agency details, point it at your domain and switch on the supplier connections you have chosen. If you come to us with your branding files ready, your domain details in hand and a clear idea of which suppliers you want to use, that stage moves along quickly and you can usually be looking at a working portal in test mode soon after you sign up. What really sets the timeline is the part that is not in our hands. If you are using your own supplier contracts, you have to wait for each supplier to issue your credentials and clear you for live traffic, and some of them take their time over it. Payment gateways also run their own checks on your business before they allow live payments. Your plan matters as well, since a portal with several supplier connections, more than one currency or more than one brand has more to configure and test than a single straightforward site. The most useful thing you can do is get the paperwork moving before the build starts, so ask us for the list of branding files, domain details and supplier information we need, and begin your supplier and payment gateway applications at the same time instead of waiting until the portal is otherwise finished.