Question 1

Can I decide how much I add on top of the supplier price, and can it be different for flights and hotels?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you set your own markup, and you can keep it different for flights, hotels and the other services you sell. The software takes the price the supplier gives, adds whatever you have told it to add, and shows your customer only the final price. Your own cost stays on the back office side, where the customer never sees it. Most portals let you choose whether the markup is a fixed amount or a percentage, and let you set it by service, by supplier, and often by route or by country as well. That means you can keep a thin markup on a busy sector where you are competing hard on price, and a wider one on a quiet sector where you are not. If you also sell through other agents, you can usually give each of them their own markup so your best agents get better rates. There are limits that are worth knowing about. Some airline fares come with rules about what may be shown or charged on top of them, and a few suppliers give you a net rate that already has their own commission inside it, so what looks like your margin may not all be yours. Taxes and fees are normally kept apart from the markup, and whether your markup is added before or after them is something you should set on purpose rather than assume. Once your portal is live, run a test search for each service you sell and check the final selling price against your supplier cost before you let your staff start booking, so you know the rules are doing exactly what you meant them to do.

Question 2

If a family books with children, will the hotel API give me the right price for the kids or do I have to work it out myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the hotel booking API will normally price the children for you, as long as you tell it how old each child is when you search. Hotel rates depend on who is sharing the room, so the search has a place for the adults and for the ages of any children with them. The rates that come back already include whatever that hotel charges for the children, which may be nothing at all, an extra bed charge, or a full adult rate if the child is above the hotel's own age limit. The ages matter more than most people expect. A child treated as an infant by one hotel may be treated as an adult by the next, because each hotel sets its own cut off. If your staff guess the ages or leave them out, the room is priced for adults only, and the hotel can ask your customer to pay the difference at the desk, or the supplier can refuse the booking because the guests do not match the ones you searched with. There are limits worth knowing. Not every room type takes children, so a family search usually returns fewer hotels than the same search for adults, and family rooms tend to sell out earlier. Where a supplier does not handle child ages well, the price may come back covering the adults only, and your portal should say so plainly rather than let the booking go through quietly. Before you start selling, run a few family searches on your own portal and check that the age boxes appear at search time and that the confirmed voucher lists every guest, children included.

Question 3

Do I need my own contracts with the airlines and hotels, or does the software come with suppliers already connected?

Accepted Answer

Both are possible, and most agencies end up using a mix of the two. If you already hold your own contract with an airline consolidator, a hotel supplier or a bed bank, you simply give us the login details they issued to you, and your portal books under your own account, on the rates and commercial terms you negotiated yourself. If you do not have any contracts yet, you can start with suppliers that are already integrated, so you can go live and begin selling while you build your own relationships in the background. Whether a particular supplier is open to you without your own agreement depends on that supplier and on the plan you are on, because some of them insist on signing the agency directly before they will release any credentials. That is their rule rather than ours, so it is worth asking about early instead of assuming. It is also fair to say that the supplier decides a lot of what you can actually do. The content you get, the markets you are allowed to sell in, the payment terms and whether you are given a credit line or have to pay upfront all come from them. We can connect to them and present the results neatly on your portal, but we cannot change the commercial terms sitting behind the connection. Before you decide, write down the handful of suppliers you really want to sell and ask us which of those are already connected and which would need an agreement in your own name, so you know exactly what you can launch with on day one and what will follow later.

Question 4

Is the ticket issued straight away when my customer pays on my portal, or is there a wait before it is confirmed?

Accepted Answer

In most cases yes, the ticket is issued straight away. For low cost airlines the payment and the ticket happen in the same step, so the moment your customer pays, the seat is bought and the airline reference comes back to your portal within seconds. Your customer gets the confirmation there and then, and nothing is left hanging. On some fares, mostly the ones that come through a global distribution system, the booking is made first and the ticket is issued as a second step. The airline holds the seats under a booking reference and gives a time limit by which the ticket must be issued, which can be a few hours or a day or two depending on the fare and the route. Your portal can be set up to issue automatically as soon as the payment clears, or to leave that step to your own staff so you can check the booking before the money goes out. Be aware that the time limit is set by the airline, not by us, and it is real. If the ticket is not issued before it runs out, the airline cancels the booking on its own and the seats go back on sale, sometimes at a different fare. So if you choose to issue manually, someone in your office has to watch the pending list every working day. Decide which of the two suits you, automatic issue or a manual check, and ask us to set your portal that way, then keep an eye on the pending bookings screen for the fares that do not issue instantly.

Question 5

Can my customers pay for the hotel when they arrive instead of paying me when they book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases they can, but it depends on the rate the supplier is offering. Hotel rates come through the API marked as either prepaid, where the money is collected at the time of booking, or pay at hotel, where your customer settles the bill at reception. Both kinds can turn up in the same search for the same property, at different prices. Your portal can show which type each rate is before anything is confirmed, so your staff know what they are selling. If you would rather keep it simple, you can usually choose to show only one kind, so your agents are not picking between the two on every booking. Keep in mind that a pay at hotel rate still normally needs a card to hold the room, even though no money moves at the time of booking. The honest limit is that you do not decide which rates exist. The supplier and the hotel set that, and some properties, and some countries, offer prepaid rates only. Your commission also works differently on a pay at hotel booking, because the money never passes through your hands, so ask each supplier how and when they pay you on those. Before you go live, run a few searches in the cities you actually sell and see what mix of rates comes back, then agree with your suppliers how you want the money to reach you.

Question 6

Will my white label travel portal work properly on a mobile phone, or is it only made for computers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your white label travel portal is built to work on a mobile phone, and in most markets that is where the majority of your customers will book. The search boxes, the results list, the passenger details form and the payment step all adjust to the size of the screen, so someone on a phone sees the same portal as someone on a laptop, just laid out to fit a smaller space. There are a few honest limits worth knowing. Some of the content that comes from the suppliers, such as long hotel descriptions and large photo galleries, arrives as the supplier sends it and can look heavier on a small screen than the rest of the page. Payment pages usually belong to your payment gateway or your bank, so how they look on a phone is decided by them. Busier screens, such as a seat map or a trip with several cities in it, still work on a phone but are easier for your staff to handle on a bigger screen. Your branding travels with it. Your logo, your colours and any pages you have added appear on the phone version as well, so a customer on a phone never sees anything that looks like it belongs to someone else. If you do add your own pages, keep the images reasonably small, because a customer on a slow mobile connection will give up on a page that takes too long to open. The best thing to do next is to open your own portal on your phone, run a real search and go as far as the payment page, on both an Android phone and an iPhone. If anything looks wrong or is hard to tap, tell us what you saw and we will take a look.

Question 7

Can I bring my old customer records and past bookings into the new software when I switch over?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can bring your old records across, although how much comes over depends on what you are able to get out of your current system. Customer details such as names, contact information, passport data and past travel history can usually be imported if you can export them into a spreadsheet or a similar file. The cleaner and more consistent that file is, the more of it lands correctly the first time. Past bookings are the harder part. A booking that is finished and only needs to sit in your records for reference can normally be brought in as history, so your staff can search it and your accountant can see it. A booking that is still live, where the travel has not happened yet and it may still need a change or a cancellation, usually cannot be moved in a way that lets you manage it from the new portal, because the supplier holding that booking still knows it under your old arrangement. Those are generally best handled where they were made until the travel date has passed. It also helps to be honest about how much history you really need. Many agencies find that two or three years of customer records and closed bookings is plenty, and trying to move everything they have ever sold slows the changeover down for very little gain. Before you fix a date for the move, export a sample of your customer list and your booking history from your current system so it can be looked at and you can be told plainly what will and will not carry over, and keep the old system readable for a few months after you go live in case you need to check something.

Question 8

Can my staff search for one particular hotel by name if the customer already knows where they want to stay?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your staff can search for a single named property instead of a whole city. The hotel booking API works from a list of properties, and each property carries its own reference in that list, so once your portal knows which hotel the customer means it can ask the supplier for that one property and come back with the room types and rates available for the travel dates, rather than a long page of results your agent then has to read through. How this feels to use depends on how the search box on your portal is set up. The usual arrangement is that the same box which accepts a city also suggests hotel names as your agent types, so they can pick the exact property from the list. For that to work smoothly, the property list behind the portal has to be kept in step with the suppliers, because hotels open, close, change their names and change their owners, and a property one supplier carries may not be loaded by another. Be prepared for the case where the hotel is found but no rooms come back. That can happen because your supplier does not contract that property at all, because it is genuinely full for those dates, or because the rates for it are limited to certain markets or booking conditions. If you buy from more than one supplier the portal can try each of them, but no portal can sell a property that none of your suppliers gives it. Before you commit, ask to see a name search run live on a handful of the hotels your own customers ask for most often, using real dates, and watch what the portal shows when one of those hotels has nothing available.

Question 9

Will I be able to see how much luggage is included in a flight fare, and can my customer buy an extra bag when they book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the baggage allowance comes back with the fare before your customer pays, and extra bags can often be added at the time of booking. The flight booking API returns the cabin and checked baggage that belongs to each fare, so your portal can show it right next to the price instead of leaving your customer to find out later. How much detail you get depends on the airline and on the supplier the fare came from. Full service airlines usually pass a clear allowance, such as a number of pieces or a weight in kilos, and that displays cleanly. Low cost carriers often sell baggage separately, so the fare arrives with little or no allowance and a list of bags you can add for a fee. A few airlines only confirm the allowance at ticketing, and in that case the honest thing is to show what the API gave you and tell your customer to check their ticket. Adding an extra bag through the API works wherever the airline supports it. When it does, the bag is attached to the booking and paid for along with the ticket, so there is nothing for your customer to settle at the airport counter. Where the airline does not support it, they will have to add the bag on the airline website or at check in, and it is better for your portal to say so plainly than to stay silent about it. Check with us which of your airlines and suppliers return full baggage details, and decide how you want your portal to word an allowance when the airline has not given one.

Question 10

Will my white label travel portal show up on Google when people search for flights and hotels, or do I have to do something myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal is built as an ordinary website that Google can find and list, but appearing near the top of the results is work you keep doing over months, not something that happens by itself on the day you go live. The software makes your site readable to search engines. Earning the traffic is still down to you. On the practical side, you can run the portal on your own web address under your own brand, you can edit the page titles and descriptions that Google shows, and you can add your own pages such as an about us page, service pages for the places you specialise in, and a blog. Search engines are given a map of those pages so they know what to look at. Whether the blog and page editing tools are included depends on your plan, so confirm that before you plan any content. There is one limit worth being honest about. The live flight and hotel listings are pulled from the suppliers at the moment a customer searches, so they are not pages sitting there waiting to be listed by Google, and nobody ranks well for a search page produced that way. What realistically brings you visitors is your own written content, your local reputation and the areas you know better than a large website does. So treat the portal as the place a customer completes the booking, not as your only source of customers. A sensible next step is to check which pages you can edit on your plan, then pick a handful of routes or destinations you actually sell and write proper pages about them, while bringing your first customers in through the channels you already use.