Question 1

Can I get my bookings and customer records out of the software and into my accounting system, or do I have to retype everything?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in almost all cases you can get your records out without retyping them. The reporting area of the software normally lets you pull bookings for a chosen date range and download them as a spreadsheet file, with the passenger names, travel dates, supplier, booking reference and the amounts collected. Your bookkeeper can then bring that file into most common accounting packages, which is how a lot of agencies handle it. Whether it goes across automatically, without anyone downloading anything, is a different matter and depends on your plan and on what your accounting package will accept. A direct link that sends each booking over as soon as it is made is extra work to set up and is not part of every arrangement, so please ask about it rather than assume it is already there. A plain download and upload, on the other hand, is something you should expect to have. One honest warning is that the column names in the download will rarely match what your accounting software expects on the first try, so somebody usually has to map the fields once at the start. After that it tends to be straightforward. How much cost detail appears also depends on the supplier, because some return their net rate to you and some only return a selling price, and the software can only pass on what it is given. The sensible next step is to pull one month of bookings, send that file to whoever does your books, and ask them which columns they actually need before you settle on a routine.

Question 2

If an airline changes or cancels my customer's flight after they have booked, will the portal tell me or do I have to keep checking myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the portal will show you that something has changed, but how quickly and how completely you find out depends on the airline and on the supplier that flight came from. The way it normally works is that the airline sends a message about the new timing or the cancellation to whoever holds the booking. That reaches the supplier, the supplier passes it on through the API, and the booking in your portal is updated so you can see that it is no longer the same as what you sold. Many full service airlines handle this well through their normal booking channels. Low cost carriers often behave differently and prefer to send the news straight to the email address on the booking, which may be yours or may be your customer's, so it is worth deciding early which address you want on there. We would rather be honest about the limits than promise you will never be caught out. Some changes arrive promptly, some arrive late, and a small time shift months before departure may not be passed on with the same urgency as a cancellation close to travel. Rebooking or refunding after a change is still the airline's decision and follows their rules, not ours, so the portal can tell you what happened but cannot always fix it for you automatically. The sensible habit is to glance at your upcoming departures regularly rather than relying on alerts alone, and to ask us which of the suppliers you are connected to send change messages through the API so you know where the weak spots are.

Question 3

If two of my hotel suppliers sell the same hotel, will my customers see it listed twice in the search results?

Accepted Answer

No, in most cases your customers will not see the same hotel twice, but it can happen occasionally and it is worth knowing why. When several suppliers sell the same property, each one describes it in its own way, with slightly different names, addresses and reference codes. The portal matches those records together so one hotel appears as one result, with the rates from the different suppliers grouped underneath it as room options. Your customer chooses the hotel first, then picks the rate that suits them best. The matching depends entirely on the data each supplier sends. Where names and addresses are clear and complete, matching is reliable. Where a supplier sends a shortened name, an out of date address or no map location at all, a property can slip through as a second listing. This is most common with small guesthouses, serviced apartments, newly opened hotels and properties that have recently changed brand. No system in the market gets this perfectly right every time, so we would rather say that plainly than promise otherwise. If you do spot a duplicate, you can report it to us and we can correct the match so it stops appearing in future searches. Depending on the suppliers you are connected to and on your plan, you may also be able to set an order of preference for suppliers in a given market, which reduces the chance of two listings competing for the same hotel in one result. Run a handful of searches in the cities you sell most often, watch for any hotel showing up more than once, and send us those examples so we can tighten the matching before you start selling.

Question 4

Can I put my own logo and agency details on the invoices and hotel vouchers that my customers receive?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups the documents your customer receives can carry your own logo, agency name and contact details, so the paperwork looks like it came from your business rather than from anywhere else. You normally upload your logo and enter your details once in the settings, and after that invoices, booking confirmations and vouchers are generated with your branding automatically whenever a booking is made. There are a few honest limits worth knowing. Some hotel suppliers issue their own voucher that the guest has to present at check in, and in those cases the supplier reference and their name may need to stay on the document exactly as issued, because that is what the hotel will recognise at the desk. Airline tickets work in a similar way, since the ticket number and the airline details come from the airline itself and cannot be replaced with your own. What you can usually brand freely is the invoice, the quote and the confirmation email you send alongside it. How much you can change beyond the logo depends on your plan and on the software setup. Swapping in your logo, name, address and footer text is generally straightforward. Rearranging the layout, adding your terms and conditions, or adding tax fields that your country requires may need extra configuration, and it is sensible to have your accountant look at a sample invoice before you start issuing them to paying customers. The simplest next step is to make one test booking, open every document it produces, and confirm which of them carry your branding and which must remain as the supplier issued them.

Question 5

Can I hold a flight booking for my customer without paying for it straight away?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes yes, but it depends entirely on the airline and the supplier behind the flight, so it is not something you can count on for every search result. Where a hold is allowed, our flight API passes it through to your portal, and you will see a time limit against the booking showing when the seats must be paid for and ticketed. If that deadline passes without payment, the airline usually releases the seats and the price may no longer be there when you come back to it. As a rough guide, bookings made through full service carriers on a traditional reservation system are the ones most likely to allow a short hold before ticketing. Low cost carriers and many online fares work differently, because the seat is only really yours once payment goes through, so there is nothing to hold. Promotional and discounted fares are often excluded from holding even on airlines that normally permit it. Because the rule sits with the airline, we cannot promise it for a particular route or fare, and the same airline may behave differently on different fares. On your portal, held bookings sit in your booking list in an unpaid state so your staff can see what is waiting and chase the customer before the deadline. You can ticket them later from the same screen once the money is in, and the system will tell you if the fare has changed or the seats have gone in the meantime. The next thing to check is which of your connected suppliers actually return a ticketing deadline, because that will tell you how far you can really work on a hold and pay later basis with your customers.

Question 6

Can my customers search for hotels near a particular landmark or area on a map, rather than just by city name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases they can, although how accurate the results are depends on the location data each hotel supplier sends us. Searching by city name is the most common way people look for a hotel, but a lot of travellers really want to be near a beach, a conference centre, a railway station, a hospital or a religious site, and a plain city search does not help them much. Most modern hotel connections support searching around a point on the map, so your portal can show properties within a set distance of that point and sort them by how close they are. In practice this works in two ways. Your customer can type a landmark or an area name into the search box and pick it from the suggestions, or they can open a map view and look at the hotels marked on it, then click one to see rooms and rates. Both rely on the supplier telling us where each hotel actually sits, and on a list of well known places for each destination that the search box can match against. The honest limit is that location quality varies between suppliers. Some give precise positions and tidy addresses for every property, others only place a hotel somewhere in the right city or district, and small independent properties are the ones most likely to be missing good data. Where that happens a hotel can appear slightly off, or not show up in a tight radius search even though it is nearby. Which landmarks are available also depends on the content your connected suppliers provide for that destination. The best next step is to run a few test searches around the landmarks your customers actually ask for and see how the results look, then tell us which suppliers and destinations matter most so we can check what location data is coming through for them.

Question 7

Can I put my white label portal on my own domain name so it looks like my own website?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can run your white label portal on your own domain name, so your customers see your web address and your branding rather than anything that points back to us. This is one of the main reasons travel businesses choose a white label portal in the first place, and it is normally set up before you go live. The way it works is simple enough. You own the domain, bought from whichever registrar you prefer, and you keep that ownership. We give you the records that your domain needs to point at, and whoever manages your domain settings makes that change on your side. It usually takes a little time for the change to spread across the internet, after which your portal answers on your own address. A secure certificate is applied as well, so your customers see the padlock in their browser and feel safe entering their details. You can also use a subdomain if you already have a website you are happy with. Many agencies keep their existing brochure site on the main address and send booking traffic to something like a book or search subdomain, which means you do not have to rebuild anything you already have. Do be aware that whether a fully custom domain is included can depend on your plan, as some entry level setups start on a shared address, and if your domain is managed by an outside web person you will need their help to make the change. Email on your domain is handled separately and is not affected by pointing the portal. Before you go live, decide whether you want the main domain or a subdomain, make sure you can access your domain settings or know who can, and ask us to confirm that custom domains are included in the plan you are on.

Question 8

Can my customers search for a trip with more than one stop on my portal, like flying out to one city and home from another?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a multi city trip is something our flight search can handle, so your customer does not have to be limited to a simple return journey. On the search panel they can add extra legs, for example out to one city, on to a second city a few days later, then home from there, and the results come back as one itinerary with a single total fare where the airline supports it. Open jaw trips, where the return is from a different airport than the arrival, work the same way. What you get back does depend on the suppliers you are connected to. Full service airlines and the content that comes through a global distribution system usually price a multi city trip as one ticket, which is tidy for your customer and gives one set of rules for changes and refunds. Low cost carriers often cannot be sold that way, so where those fares are included the portal has to build the journey from separate one way tickets. That still works for the traveller, but each leg then carries its own baggage allowance, its own change rules and its own cancellation terms, and you should tell your customer that before they pay. There are a couple of honest limits. Each supplier sets how many legs it will accept in one search, so a very long itinerary may need to be split into two bookings. Some routing combinations simply return no result because no airline files a fare for them, and in those cases the trip can still be put together manually from separate searches. Which suppliers appear in your search also depends on the connections set up on your account. The best next step is to run a few of the multi city routes your customers actually ask for and see which of your connected suppliers return a single ticket and which come back as separate legs, so you know what to explain at the time of quoting.

Question 9

Can I enter bookings I made over the phone or direct with a hotel into the software so everything is in one place?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can. Travel agency software normally has a way to add a booking by hand, often called an offline or manual booking, for anything you arranged away from the portal. You fill in the details yourself, such as the passenger names, the travel dates, the supplier you used, what you paid and what you are charging the customer, and that booking then sits in your system alongside the ones that came through your API suppliers. The reason agencies ask for this is that it keeps one single record of the business. Your monthly sales reports, your customer history and your agent performance figures all become much more useful once the phone bookings and the direct hotel deals are included. In most cases you can also raise an invoice or a voucher for a manual booking from the same system, so the paperwork your customer receives looks the same no matter where the booking came from. The honest limit is that a manual booking is a record, not a live connection. The software is not talking to that hotel or airline, so it cannot check availability, cannot amend the booking and cannot cancel it for you. If the customer wants a change, you still have to contact the supplier directly and then come back and update the record so your figures stay correct. How many fields you can capture, and whether the manual booking option is switched on at all, depends on your plan and how your portal has been set up. Ask us to walk you through the manual booking screen on your own account so you can see which details are required, and agree a simple rule with your staff that offline bookings go in the same day they are made.

Question 10

Can my portal show prices in different currencies and languages so I can sell to customers in other countries?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases a white label portal can display more than one currency and more than one language, though how far that goes depends on your plan and on what the suppliers behind your portal send back. On the currency side, the usual setup is that each supplier returns its rates in its own selling currency, and the portal converts that into the currency your customer has chosen before showing it on screen. You can normally decide which currencies appear in the dropdown, and you can decide whether the conversion follows a rate feed or a rate you set and update yourself. The important thing to remember is that the currency your customer sees is not always the currency the money finally settles in. That part is controlled by your payment gateway and your bank, so your customer may still see a small difference on their card statement, and a card issuer may add its own foreign exchange charge on top. Language works a little differently. The wording that belongs to the portal itself, things like search labels, buttons, booking steps and confirmation emails, can usually be translated and swapped based on the language the customer picks. Content that arrives from a supplier, such as hotel descriptions, room names, airline fare conditions and cancellation terms, comes through in whatever language that supplier provides, and for many suppliers that is English only. You can translate some of it yourself if you are willing to maintain it, but it will not all appear translated on its own. If you are planning to sell into a particular market, tell us which currencies and languages matter most to you and we can confirm what your suppliers actually return before you commit to it.