Question 1

If my customer's name is spelled wrong on a flight they have already booked, can I correct it myself on the portal?

Accepted Answer

In most cases no, a name correction is not something you can push through on your own from the portal. Once a ticket is issued, the passenger name sits in the airline's own record, and airlines treat names as a security matter, so the carrier decides whether a correction is allowed, what evidence it wants and what it charges. What the portal can do is show you the booking exactly as it was sent, including the name fields, so you can see where the mistake happened and raise the request with your supplier straight away. How much is actually possible depends on the airline and on what the flight API passes through. Some carriers accept a small spelling fix, a swap of the first and family name, or a missing middle name being added, and a few of those requests can be sent through the API so they reach the airline without a manual message. Other carriers will not amend a name at all and expect the ticket to be cancelled and rebooked, which means the original fare rules apply and the fare you resell may not be the one you originally quoted. Low cost carriers usually run their own separate process again. Timing matters more than anything else. If the error is spotted very soon after ticketing, some tickets can still be voided and reissued cleanly, but once that window has passed it becomes a change or a cancellation with whatever rules the fare carries. We cannot promise a particular outcome for a particular airline, because that sits with the carrier and with your supplier agreement. The safest step is prevention, so check passenger names against the passport before you issue, and ask your supplier for a list of which airlines they can correct names with and how long you have to do it.

Question 2

Can the software put together a quote for a customer that I can send them before they pay anything?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can build a quote on the software and send it to your customer before any money changes hands. You search for the flights or hotels in the normal way, pick the options you want to offer, add your own markup and a few notes about what is included, and save the whole thing as a quotation under your own brand. Your customer can then receive it as a document or a link to look at in their own time. The important thing to be clear about is that a quote is not the same as a held seat or a held room. The prices and availability you captured came from the supplier at that moment, and they can move before the customer says yes. Some suppliers change fares and room rates several times a day, so an older quote may need to be refreshed before you take payment. It helps to put a validity date on your quotes and to tell the customer plainly that the final price is confirmed when they pay. How much a quote can do depends on your plan and on the suppliers you are connected to. Showing a few alternatives side by side, adding your own day by day itinerary text, hiding your cost and showing only the selling price, and turning an accepted quote straight into a booking without typing everything again are all common, but not every setup includes all of them. Where a supplier sends us limited information, the quote can only show what we receive. Before you build your sales process around quotes, tell us how you normally send offers to customers so we can confirm which parts are available on your plan, then try one real quote from start to finish and see how it looks at the customer end.

Question 3

Can I give my office staff different levels of access on the software so that only some of them can see the money side of things?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can normally give each member of staff their own login and decide what that login is allowed to see and do. The usual approach is to set up a few roles, such as one for the people who only search and make bookings, one for whoever handles accounts and refunds, and a full access role for you as the owner. Once a role is in place you simply attach each new staff login to it, so you are not setting permissions one person at a time. In practice this means your counter staff can search, quote and confirm bookings without seeing your net cost from the supplier, your markup, or the overall sales reports. The accounts person can see payments, invoices and refunds but does not need to be given the ability to change markup rules or add new suppliers. Only your own login keeps the settings that would affect the whole business, like supplier connections and pricing rules, which is also useful protection against honest mistakes. How finely you can slice this does depend on your plan and on which parts of the system you are using. Some reporting sections are easier to switch on or off as a whole than to filter line by line, and a record of who did what is not available in every setup, so it is worth asking rather than assuming. Anything coming straight from a supplier, such as their own terms shown at the point of booking, is also outside what we can hide. Before you add your team, write down each person's job and exactly what you are comfortable with them seeing, then ask us to create one test login per role so you can sign in and check it yourself.

Question 4

Can my customers buy extra baggage on my portal when they book a flight, or do they have to sort that out at the airport?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases extra baggage can be added on your portal at the time of booking, but it depends entirely on the airline and on what the flight API you are connected to supports. Low cost carriers usually sell baggage as an add on and most APIs pass those options through, so your customer sees the available weight choices and the cost before paying. Many full service airlines include a baggage allowance in the fare itself, so there is nothing extra to sell, and some of them do not open up paid baggage through the booking API at all. Where it is supported, the flow is straightforward for your staff. After the flight is selected, the portal shows the baggage choices returned by the airline for that specific fare, your customer picks what they need, and the charge is added to the total they pay you. The allowance is then attached to the ticket, so it shows on the confirmation and the passenger does not have to pay again at the counter. Where it is not supported, your customer either travels on the included allowance or buys the extra bag directly from the airline, usually on the airline website or at check in. Your portal cannot create an allowance the airline has not made available to us, and we would rather tell you that plainly than have a passenger turned away at the desk. The sensible next step is to tell us which routes and airlines you sell most, and we will confirm which of them return paid baggage options on your connection so your staff know when to offer it and when to point the customer to the airline.

Question 5

If my customer cancels their hotel booking, can I cancel it myself on the portal or do I have to contact the supplier?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can cancel a hotel booking yourself from the portal without contacting anyone, as long as the supplier behind that booking supports cancellation through the API. You would open the booking in your booking list, choose the cancel option, and the request goes straight to the supplier. If the supplier accepts it, the booking status updates and you get a cancellation reference you can pass on to your customer. Whether cancellation is even allowed depends entirely on the rate your customer booked. Some hotel rates are fully refundable up to a deadline, some become non refundable after that deadline passes, and some are non refundable from the moment they are confirmed. The portal shows you the cancellation terms and the deadline before you confirm, and again on the booking itself, so you can check where you stand before you promise your customer anything. If the rate is non refundable, the cancel option will either be unavailable or will warn you that no money comes back. The refund is a separate matter from the cancellation. Cancelling tells the supplier to release the room and stop charging you. Getting money back to your customer depends on how they paid and which payment setup you use, and it usually takes a few working days to clear through the card network. Some suppliers also hold back a fee even on refundable rates, so the amount returned to you may not match what you originally paid. Before your customer books, check the cancellation deadline shown on the rate, and after any cancellation, keep the reference from the supplier in case there is a dispute later.

Question 6

Can I give my sub agents a credit limit on the portal so they can book now and settle with me later?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can give each sub agent a credit limit so they can confirm bookings without sending you money first. The usual way this works is that every agent login has its own balance on the portal. You decide how much credit that agent is allowed, and each time they confirm a booking the amount is taken off their available balance. When the balance runs out, the portal stops them from confirming anything new until you receive their payment and top the account back up. Alongside credit you can normally also run a prepaid balance, where the agent pays you in advance and books against that deposit. Many agencies use both, a deposit for newer agents and a credit limit for the ones they trust and have worked with for a long time. The portal keeps a record of every booking, every top up and every adjustment, so at the end of the week or month you can see what each agent owes you and send them a statement rather than working it out from your own notes. The honest limit here is that credit is your risk, not the supplier's. The airline, hotel or API supplier still needs to be paid on their own terms, and many of them want payment at the moment of booking, so when you extend credit to an agent you are funding that booking yourself until they settle. Whether agent credit and deposit features are included also depends on your plan and on how your portal is set up, so it is worth confirming before you promise anything to your agents. It would be sensible to decide which agents you actually want to give credit to and how you will chase late payments, then ask us to check that agent credit and wallet controls are switched on for your portal.

Question 7

Will my white label portal work properly on a mobile phone, or is it mainly for people booking on a computer?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label portal from glideFares is built to work on a phone as well as on a desktop computer. The pages adjust to the size of the screen, so a customer searching on a phone sees the same search box, the same results and the same booking form, just laid out in a single column that is easier to scroll and tap. Most agencies now get a good share of their traffic from phones, so the booking path is designed with that in mind rather than treated as an afterthought. There are a few things outside our control, and it is fair to tell you about them. When a customer reaches the payment step, that page often belongs to your payment provider or to the customer's own bank for card verification, and how well it behaves on a small screen is up to them. The same applies to any supplier page a customer is passed to, and to documents such as tickets or vouchers that open as PDF files, which can be awkward to read on a narrow screen even though they download without trouble. Very old phones and browsers that no longer receive updates may also show pages imperfectly. If what you actually want is a separate app that customers download from an app store, that is a different piece of work from a mobile friendly website, and whether it is included depends on the plan you are on, so please ask us rather than assume it is covered. The best thing to do next is to open your test portal on your own phone and on a colleague's phone of a different make, run a search and go all the way to the payment step, then tell us about anything that looks cramped or hard to tap so it can be sorted out before you go live.

Question 8

If my customer wants a late check in or twin beds instead of a double, can I send that request to the hotel through my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can pass a special request through with the booking, but please treat it as a request and not a guarantee. When you confirm a hotel booking there is normally a notes or special request box, and what you type there is sent on to the supplier along with the reservation. Requests like a late arrival, twin beds instead of a double, a quiet room, a high floor, rooms next to each other, or a note that the guests are celebrating an anniversary are the kind of thing that travels well this way. Whether the request actually reaches the front desk depends on the supplier you are booking through. Some suppliers carry your free text straight to the hotel, some only accept a fixed list of request codes and will drop anything else, and a few do not pass notes on at all. Even when the note does arrive, the hotel decides on the day of arrival based on what rooms are free, so it is always safer to tell your customer that you have asked rather than that it is confirmed. Anything that costs money or that your customer really cannot do without should not go in that box. Extra beds, cots, early check in, late check out, connecting rooms and accessible rooms are often sold as part of a specific room type or as a paid add on, and where the supplier offers that you should book it properly instead of asking in a note. Bed type is sometimes built into the room name too, so choosing the right room is more reliable than requesting it. Before you rely on this with customers, make a test booking with each supplier you have connected and check what the confirmation shows back, then word your own emails to customers as a request that has been passed to the hotel.

Question 9

If my customer needs to change the date of their flight after they have already paid, can I do that on the portal myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases you can make a date change directly from the booking screen on your portal, but how far you get depends on the airline and the supplier that fare came from, so some changes will still have to be raised as a request rather than done by your staff in a few clicks. When it works the normal way, your agent opens the existing booking, asks for a change, and the portal goes back to the airline or supplier to see what alternative dates are offered and what extra money is payable. That extra is usually the difference in fare plus whatever change fee the airline applies. Your agent collects it from the customer, confirms the change, and a new ticket is issued with an updated confirmation going out to the traveller. Where an airline does not allow changes to be made through the connection, the request is passed to the support team to handle with the airline, which means it is not instant and you should tell your customer to expect a wait. There are real limits worth knowing. The cheapest fares are often not changeable at all, and the only option is cancellation on whatever terms that fare carries. Tickets where part of the journey has already been flown, bookings that combine more than one airline, and group bookings are usually dealt with manually rather than on screen. Name changes are almost never permitted on an air ticket. Very close to departure the airline may close changes entirely, and at that point only the airline itself can help. Before you promise anything to a customer, check the change and cancellation rules shown at the time of booking, and ask us which of the airlines you are connected to support changes through your portal so your staff know which cases they can finish themselves.

Question 10

Can I run more than one white label portal from the same account, one for my walk in customers and another for my corporate clients?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can run more than a single white label portal from the same setup, and keeping one site for walk in customers and another for corporate clients is a fairly common way to work. Each portal can sit on its own web address with its own logo, colours and wording, so the two audiences never see the same branding or the same front page. What you can change between portals usually goes further than the design. You can normally decide which products appear on each site, which suppliers feed each site, and what markup or service fee is applied, so your corporate portal can show your negotiated rates and quieter pricing while your retail portal works on a different margin. Whether every one of these settings can be split portal by portal depends on your plan and on what the connected suppliers allow, so it is worth confirming the exact list with us before you start building. On the back office side, bookings from all your portals normally arrive in the same place, so your team works from a single queue and your reports cover the whole business rather than each site in isolation. If you need completely separate reporting, separate staff logins or separate accounting for each portal, that is possible in some arrangements but not in all of them, so please treat it as a question to ask rather than something to assume. The useful next step is to write down what each audience needs to see differently, covering branding, products, pricing and who is allowed to log in, and send that to our team so we can tell you which parts can be separated on your current plan.