Question 1

Can I hold a hotel room for my customer for a day or two while they make up their mind, without paying for it?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes, but not on every hotel, and it depends on the supplier the rate comes from. Most hotel rates that reach your portal through an API are live rates, which means the room is only reserved at the moment the booking is confirmed. Until that happens the room stays in general sale, so another agent or another website can take it while your customer is still deciding. The way most travel businesses handle this is with free cancellation rates rather than a hold. You confirm the booking for your customer straight away, and if they change their mind before the cancellation deadline you cancel it at no cost. Your customer gets a genuinely confirmed room and you are not locked in. The catch is that the deadline is set by the hotel or the supplier, not by the software, and some rates are non refundable from the moment they are booked, so this will not work on every option in your search results. A smaller number of suppliers do offer a proper option period, where a room is held for a day or two before any payment is made. That is usually on contracted or group rates rather than ordinary online rates, and it is often arranged by the supplier's own team instead of through the API. Whether you can use it comes down to which suppliers are connected to your portal and what your agreement with them allows. If holding rooms matters to the way you sell, check the cancellation terms shown against each rate in your search results, and ask which of your connected suppliers will give you an option period on group bookings.

Question 2

Can I sell airport transfers and sightseeing trips on my portal, or is it only flights and hotels?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel portals can sell airport transfers and sightseeing trips as well as flights and hotels, but it depends on which suppliers are connected to your account. Transfers and activities come from different providers than the ones that give you flight and hotel content, so they are usually switched on separately. Once they are on, the search and booking pages work much like the hotel pages, and the booking lands in the same booking list your staff already use. The content is normally thinner than hotel content. A transfer will tell you the vehicle type, how many passengers and bags it takes, and whether the driver meets the customer inside the terminal. A sightseeing product will carry a description, photos, the times it runs and what is included. How much detail arrives, and how many cities are covered, is decided by the supplier, so search a few of your own busiest destinations before you promise it to customers. You can also load your own products instead of buying them in. If you have a contract with a local transfer company or a guide, most portals let you add that product by hand with your own price and your own terms and sell it beside the supplier content, which is often better value in the places where you are already strong. Ask what transfer and activity suppliers your current plan includes, and decide whether you want these sold on their own or offered as an add on at the end of a flight or hotel booking, because the two are set up differently.

Question 3

Can my customers pay by card on my portal, and does that money come straight to my own bank account?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can take card payments on your own portal, and the money reaches your own bank account rather than passing through us first. The way this works is that the payment gateway account is opened in your company's name, and your portal is simply connected to it, so every card payment your customer makes settles into the bank account you have registered with that gateway. To set this up you sign up with a payment gateway that operates in your country, complete the business verification they ask for, and then give us the keys they issue so the checkout on your portal can talk to them. Which gateways you can use depends on where your business is registered and what your plan covers, so it is worth asking before you assume a particular one will work. The gateway, not us, decides how quickly your money settles and what it charges you per transaction, and those terms come from your own agreement with them. Refunds go back out the same way they came in, through your gateway and onto the customer's card, so that money leaves your account and it is worth keeping enough there to cover cancellations. Also remember that a successful card payment does not by itself guarantee a confirmed ticket or room, because the supplier still has to accept the booking, and if it does not you will need to refund from your side. Before you go live, check with the gateway you have chosen which currencies and card types they accept, and make sure the bank account you give them is the one you actually want your booking money landing in.

Question 4

Will the hotel photos and descriptions come through on their own, or do I have to put all that on my portal myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the photographs and descriptions arrive with the search results, so you do not have to build that content yourself. When your portal asks a hotel supplier what is available, the reply carries more than a room and a rate. It normally includes the hotel name and address, a short description of the property, the facilities, the room type names and a set of photographs, and often the star rating and the map location as well. Your portal reads all of that and lays it out on the hotel page your customer sees, so those pages fill themselves in as soon as a supplier is connected to you. How rich that content is does depend on the supplier and on the property. Some suppliers send long descriptions and plenty of photographs for every hotel they sell, others send only a few pictures and a short line of text, and the occasional small independent property has very little attached to it at all. The text also comes in whatever language the supplier provides, usually English, so a description may stay in English even when the rest of your portal is shown in another language. For that reason you may want to improve some pages yourself. You can usually add your own photographs and your own wording for the properties you know well, and your version then shows in place of the supplier's. It is worth doing that for the hotels your customers ask for by name rather than trying to rewrite everything, since the supplier content refreshes on its own and covers far more properties than you could keep up with by hand. Before you go live, search a few hotels you sell regularly and see how they look, then decide which of those pages deserve your own words and pictures.

Question 5

Can the software give my customer a proper invoice for their booking that I can also use for my own accounts?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the software can produce an invoice for every booking, and the same document works for your own accounts. It is built from the booking record itself, so your agency name, your logo, your address, the booking reference, the traveller names, the service details and the amount paid all carry over without your staff typing anything twice. Your staff can download it as a PDF or email it to the customer from the booking screen, and send it again later if the customer loses it. It helps to know that your invoice is a separate document from whatever the supplier issues. The airline ticket and the hotel voucher are the supplier's papers and carry the supplier's own wording. Your invoice is the one that shows what your customer owes you or has already paid you, including anything you added on top, so it is the document your accountant will actually work from. Tax is the part that depends on where you operate. We can show your tax registration number, add tax lines and set the wording and layout you ask for, but the rates and the treatment are for you or your accountant to confirm, because the rules differ from one country to another and we cannot decide that for you. If you sell to company clients who want one statement covering many bookings in a period instead of an invoice per booking, that is often possible, though it can depend on your plan, so please ask rather than assume it is included. The simplest next step is to take the invoice you issue today, mark the fields your accountant insists on, and share it early so the layout can be matched and checked before you start selling.

Question 6

Can my portal show prices in a different currency if my customer is from another country?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your portal can show prices in a currency other than your own, but how far that goes depends on your suppliers and your payment setup. The usual way it works is that your portal has one base currency, the one your suppliers bill you in, and a conversion rate is applied on top so the customer sees a familiar currency while they search. You can normally choose which currencies to offer, and whether the customer picks one themselves or the portal guesses from where they are browsing. Rates are refreshed from a rate source on a schedule, and many agencies add a small buffer to the rate so a movement between the search and the payment does not eat into their margin. Where it gets less flexible is the actual charge. Some suppliers will only confirm and bill in their own currency, and your payment gateway may only be able to collect in the currencies your bank account supports. So a customer can often see the price in their own currency while the money is still taken in yours, and their card issuer then does its own conversion. The voucher or ticket may also still carry the supplier currency, because that is what the airline or the hotel issued. Whether you can genuinely settle in a second currency comes down to your gateway, your bank and your plan, so check first which currencies your payment gateway and bank account can accept, then ask which of your connected suppliers can confirm in those currencies.

Question 7

If my customer wants to fly out with one airline and come back with a different one, can I sell that as one booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can put an outbound flight from one airline together with a return from a different airline and sell it to your customer as one trip on your portal. The flight API can search each direction on its own and bring back the best options from every airline it is connected to, so your staff can choose one carrier going out and another coming back. To the customer it looks like a single booking with one total price and one confirmation. What you should understand is that behind the scenes this is normally two separate tickets rather than one. Each ticket follows the rules of the airline that issued it. The baggage allowance can be different on each leg, the change and cancellation charges are worked out separately for each half, and if the outbound flight is delayed the second airline is under no obligation to carry your customer on a later flight. That is an airline rule, not something the software decides. Whether you can do this at all depends on the supplier feeds sitting behind your portal and on the plan you are on. Some sources return mixed airline combinations on their own, others will only sell each airline as its own journey, and low cost carriers in particular are often sold as a separate ticket with their own payment and their own conditions. Before you promise this to a customer, run a test search on your own portal for the route you sell most often and look at how the two halves are priced and what the fare rules say, then tell your customer plainly that the two legs are ticketed separately so nobody is caught out if a flight time moves.

Question 8

Can my staff make a booking on the portal for a customer who phones my office instead of the customer booking online themselves?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your staff can make a booking for a customer who rings your office, and in the early months most bookings on a new portal are made this way rather than by travellers on their own. Your agent logs in to the same portal with a staff account and then searches, books and pays much as a customer would, but seeing the prices and options your account is allowed to see. Because it is a staff booking rather than a public one, you can usually settle it in ways a website visitor cannot, for example against the balance held on your account or against the credit you have given a sub agent, and you can record a booking for a customer who is paying you by bank transfer or in cash afterwards. Two parts of this depend on your own setup rather than on the portal. What each agent is allowed to do, such as seeing cost prices or cancelling a confirmed booking, follows the permissions you give that account. Which payment methods appear in the back office depends on your plan and on what your payment provider permits, so taking a card over the phone may not be possible in the same way an online payment is. Before you go live, sit with one of your agents and put a real booking through from a staff login from search to voucher, so you know exactly what they can see and how they will take money during a phone call.

Question 9

If my customer does not turn up at the hotel at all, will I still be charged for the room?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will still be charged, because a guest who does not arrive is treated by the hotel as a booking that was never cancelled rather than as a booking that was called off. What exactly happens depends on the rate your customer booked. On a non refundable rate the whole stay is normally charged and nothing comes back. On a rate that allowed free cancellation, the hotel is still usually within its rights to apply a no show charge, because the cancellation deadline went by and nobody told them the guest was not coming. Many hotels also release the rest of the stay once the first night is missed, so a customer who simply arrives late may find the remaining nights have been given away. Through the hotel API you can cancel the booking or raise the no show with the supplier, but whether any money comes back is the hotel's decision and not something your portal can settle by itself. The booking will normally change to a no show in your admin area once the supplier passes that back, which can take a little while after the check in date. Your own position with the customer does not change on its own either, so if you have already collected the money it stays with you until you decide what to return. The practical thing is to tell your staff to cancel in the portal the moment a customer says they are not travelling, even if it is past the free cancellation date, because a proper cancellation is almost always treated better than silence. Check the cancellation terms shown at the time of booking so you know in advance what a late change will cost you.

Question 10

Do I need to hire a technical person to run my travel portal, or can my own booking staff manage it themselves?

Accepted Answer

No, you do not need a technical person for the day to day running of the portal. The people who already handle your bookings can log in and use it the way they use any ordinary website. Searching, booking, issuing, cancelling, printing a voucher and sending a confirmation are all done from the screen, with nothing to program and nothing to install on their computers. The settings side is also meant for an owner who is not technical. Putting up your logo, changing the contact details customers see, setting the amount you add on top of the supplier price, creating a login for a new member of staff and switching a supplier on or off are all done from the admin screens. If you are comfortable running an email account and a social media page for your agency, you will be comfortable here. There are a few jobs that do genuinely need someone with technical skill, and they are usually one time jobs at the start. Pointing your own web address at the portal, adding the search to a website you already own, and connecting your own payment gateway all involve settings that sit with your domain provider or your bank, not with you. Our team normally walks through these with you during setup, and if you have a web person they may need to make one small change at their end. Anything built specially for your agency is development work, so what is possible depends on your plan. Before setup begins, write down the things you expect to change yourself once you are live and the things you would rather we handle, then go through that list with us so neither side is left waiting on the other.