Question 1

Can I ask the hotel for things like a late check in or a room on a high floor when my customer books through the API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can send special requests with a hotel booking through the API, but treat them as requests and not as something confirmed. The note travels with the booking to the supplier, who passes it to the property, and the property decides whether it can honour it, often only when your customer arrives. In practice it is usually a free text note you fill in at the time of booking, and with some suppliers a short list of standard preferences such as a twin bed, a non smoking room or a quiet floor. What you can send depends on the supplier behind that hotel. Some accept a reasonably long note, some cut it to a few characters, and a few accept only their own fixed list, so the same request may not be available for every hotel on your portal. It also helps to know what a special request is not. Anything that changes the room, the number of guests or the price, such as an extra bed, an extra person or a different room type, has to be booked properly as part of the room selection. Put it in the notes instead and the property can refuse it or ask your customer to pay at the desk. Before you promise anything, check which request fields your supplier supports for the hotels you sell most, and word your booking page so the customer understands the request is subject to availability. For anything your customer cannot travel without, such as an accessible room, have your team confirm it with the property directly once the booking is made.

Question 2

Can I see reports on how much my agency has sold, or do I have to add the bookings up myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the software keeps a record of every booking made on your portal and can add those up into reports for you, so you do not have to sit with a spreadsheet at the end of every month. In most setups you can look at your sales by date range, by service such as flights or hotels, by the staff member or sub agent who made the booking, and by supplier. You can usually see what was sold, what it cost you and what you kept as your own margin, and you can open any line to get to the booking behind it. Reports can normally be exported so you can pass them to your accountant or work on them yourself. How much detail you get does depend on your plan and on what the suppliers actually send back. Some suppliers return a full fare and commission breakdown, others return very little, and a report can only show what has genuinely come through. Bookings your staff make away from the portal, over the phone or straight with an airline, will not appear at all unless somebody enters them into the system first. The sensible next step is to write down the few figures you really look at each month, and then check whether they are already in the standard reports or need to be set up for your account.

Question 3

If my staff types a passenger name wrongly on a flight booking, can I correct it through the API?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes yes, but it depends on the airline rather than on the software. A small spelling correction, like one or two letters in a first name, is something many airlines allow, and where the airline supports it the correction can be sent through the API. A bigger change, such as putting a different person on the ticket, is almost never allowed, because the ticket belongs to the person named on it. What matters just as much is how soon you catch it. If the mistake is spotted before the ticket is issued, you can usually cancel the held booking and make it again with the correct name, and nothing is lost. Once the ticket is issued, the airline decides. It may charge a correction charge, ask to see the passport page as proof, or simply refuse and tell you to cancel and rebook at whatever fare is available that day. Low cost airlines and full service airlines behave quite differently here, and some suppliers handle name corrections through their own support desk instead of through the API, so the request may need a person at the other end even though the rest of your booking work is automated. That is why one correction comes back in minutes and another takes a day. The safest habit is to check every name against the passport before you issue the ticket, because that is the one moment a fix costs you nothing. If you need to know what is possible after issue, ask us which of the airlines and suppliers connected to your account accept name corrections through the API, and we will tell you plainly which ones do not.

Question 4

Can I show my portal in more than one language so customers who do not read English can book on it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can run your portal in more than one language. The parts of the site that belong to you, the menus, the search forms, the buttons, the booking steps and your own pages, can all be translated, and your customer can pick their language on the site itself without needing a separate portal for each one. Where it gets less tidy is the content that arrives from the suppliers. Hotel descriptions, room names, airline and airport names, fare rules and cancellation terms come through the API in whatever language the supplier sends, and for many of them that means English only. A few of the larger hotel suppliers do return descriptions in some major languages, and where they do, your customers will see them. But you cannot assume every supplier covers every language you want, so some lines in the results may stay in English even when the rest of the page is translated. The same applies to the emails and vouchers your customers receive. The wording you control can be translated, while any text the supplier sends for that booking comes through as the supplier wrote it. Whether a particular language is available to you, and how much of it is set up, also depends on your plan and on how your portal is configured. The sensible next step is to write down the languages your customers actually book in, and then check with us which of your suppliers return content in those languages before you promise a fully translated experience.

Question 5

Can my customers narrow down the hotel results on my portal, like only showing hotels with breakfast included or in a certain area?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your customers can narrow hotel results instead of scrolling through every property in a city. The hotel booking API sends details along with each property, such as the star rating, the area it sits in, whether a meal is included in the rate and the main facilities, and your portal turns those details into the filters your customers click on. Price range, star rating, board type and location are the ones travellers reach for most often, and they work the same way on a phone as they do on a laptop. How far the filters can go depends on the supplier and on the hotel itself. Facility information comes from the properties, so one hotel may describe its pool, parking and gym in full while another on the same street says almost nothing. When a property does not report a facility, it cannot be matched to that filter, so it can disappear from the results when a customer ticks the box even though the hotel really does have it. That is worth knowing before you offer a very long list of filters. You can also choose which filters appear on your portal and in what order, and the same applies to sorting, so results can open cheapest first or highest rated first depending on what your customers respond to. Keeping the list short and reliable usually gives a better experience than showing every option the suppliers offer. Before you go live, run a few searches in a city you sell often and see how many properties actually carry the information behind each filter you want to switch on. If a filter empties the page too easily, leave it off and keep the ones your suppliers fill in properly.

Question 6

Can I follow the progress of a refund after my customer cancels, or do I have to chase the supplier myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can track it, up to a point. When a cancellation is made, the booking is marked as cancelled and the amount the airline or the supplier has agreed to return is recorded against it, so you and your customer both have something in writing from the moment it happens. Your reports will show it as a cancelled sale instead of leaving it sitting in your takings. What the software cannot do is make the money arrive. The refund is paid out by the airline or the hotel supplier on their own timetable, and that is quick with some and slow with others, especially where a person at their end has to review it first. The API passes on whatever status that supplier publishes, and where a supplier publishes nothing, the honest answer is that someone in your office will still have to follow it up. It also helps to keep in mind that a refund and a cancellation charge are two different things. What comes back is what is left after the supplier has taken its charge and after anything you keep as your own service fee, so the amount your customer is told to expect should be the net one. Agreeing that clearly at the start saves a lot of difficult conversations later. A good next step is to make one test cancellation with each supplier you use and note how much status information you really get back, so you know in advance which ones your team will have to chase by hand.

Question 7

Can I control what each of my staff members is allowed to do on the portal, so a new agent cannot see my cost prices?

Accepted Answer

Yes, staff work through their own logins and you decide what each login can reach. You set up a separate account for every person in your office rather than sharing one, and then you give that account a role. The role is what controls whether someone can only search and make bookings, or can also cancel, issue refunds, change markups and open the accounts section. A new agent can be given a login that lets them sell and nothing else. Cost prices are part of this. The buying price that comes from the supplier and the markup you have added sit in the parts of the system meant for you and your senior staff, so a counter agent can be left seeing only the selling price the customer pays. Do check this on your own setup before you hand out logins, because what a role can see is something you configure, and it is easy to leave a permission switched on by accident when you are in a hurry. Everything a staff member does is stamped with their login, so if a booking is cancelled or a price is changed you can see who did it and when. That also means you should never let two people share one account, or the record stops being useful to you. When someone leaves, switch their login off rather than deleting it, so their past bookings stay linked to a real name, and take a few minutes to go through your roles now and decide which one each person in your office should sit in.

Question 8

Will flight searches on my portal come back fast enough, or will my customers be left waiting?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a flight search on your portal will normally come back quickly enough that a customer stays with it, but the honest answer is that the speed is not entirely ours to control, because every search has to travel out to the airlines and suppliers and wait for them to reply. A few things make the difference. The more suppliers you have switched on, the more replies there are to collect, so a portal connected to many sources takes a little longer than one connected to two or three. Simple one way and return searches on busy routes are the quickest. Searches across several cities, or over a spread of dates, are heavier work, and some airlines are simply slower to answer than others at their busy hours. Results are shown as they arrive rather than held back until the last supplier has replied, so your customer has something to look at while the rest fill in. There is also a cut off on every search, so if one supplier is crawling it is left out of that search instead of holding up the whole page for everyone. That keeps the portal usable, although it does mean a very slow supplier can be missing from one particular set of results. A search that has just been run is served again faster than the first time it was asked for. The best check is to run your own busiest routes at the hours your customers really search, with the suppliers you plan to keep switched on, and see how it feels to you before you judge it.

Question 9

Is there a chance a hotel room my customer sees in the search is already sold out by the time they pay?

Accepted Answer

Yes, that can happen, although it is not common. The results you see in a hotel search come from the rates and availability your suppliers have given most recently, and availability keeps moving while your customer is still looking. In a busy season, or for a check in that is only a day or two away, a room can be taken by someone else between the moment your customer searches and the moment they decide to pay. To stop this becoming a bad surprise, the portal checks the room again with the supplier just before the payment is taken. If the room is still there, the booking goes through at the price shown. If it has gone, your customer sees a clear message on the booking page and is sent back to the results to choose another room, and nothing is charged to the card. It is rarer for a room to fall away after a booking is already confirmed, and what happens then depends on the supplier. Some suppliers send an update that appears against the booking in your panel, so your staff can see it and act on it. Others expect you to contact them directly. Either way you would then either move the customer to another hotel or ask for a refund under that supplier's rules. If this matters a lot to your business, ask which of your suppliers return live availability at the time of booking and which work from a stored feed, because the two behave differently on stays that start the same day. It is also worth telling your staff to reconfirm any same night booking before they promise it to the customer.

Question 10

If one of my suppliers stops responding, will my portal still show results from the others?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A search on your portal goes out to every supplier you have switched on at the same time, and the results page is built from whichever ones answer in time. So if one supplier is slow or not responding at all, the others still come through and your customer sees a normal list of options rather than an error or an empty page. What you do lose is that supplier's own inventory for as long as they are unavailable. If a particular hotel or a particular fare only exists with that one supplier, it will not show up until they are back. This is the main reason most agencies connect more than one supplier for the same product, so a problem at one of them means fewer choices for your customer instead of no choices. There is also a waiting limit on every search, because the page cannot sit there forever hoping a slow supplier will reply. A supplier that answers after that limit has passed is simply left out of that search, even though nothing is really broken at their end. If you have one supplier that is consistently slower than the rest, that limit can be looked at, but keep in mind that allowing a longer wait makes every search feel slower for all your customers. If you start noticing that results look thinner at certain times of day, ask support to check which supplier dropped out and when, because that is recorded for you. In most cases the cause sits with the supplier rather than with your portal, so the next step is to raise it with them.