Question 1

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 2

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.

Question 3

How long will it take before my white label portal is actually live and I can start selling?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can be up and selling fairly quickly, and the portal itself is usually the fastest part of the whole process. The software is already built, so nothing has to be created from scratch for you. What actually sets your go live date is the work around the portal, mainly your supplier accounts, your web address and your own branding and content. The quick part is the setup you control. Your logo, your colours, the pages you want, the services you want to show and the staff logins can all be put in place in a short time once you have decided what you want. If you already know your brand and have your text and images ready, this stage rarely holds anything up. The slower part is almost always supplier approval. If you are selling on your own contracts with airlines, hotel suppliers or consolidators, each of them has its own sign up, testing and go live process, and how fast they move is up to them, not up to us. The same is true of your payment gateway, which has to approve your business before it will let you take live card payments. Many agencies go live taking payment by bank transfer or on account first, and switch card payments on later when that approval comes through. The most useful thing you can do is start your supplier and payment gateway applications on the very first day, and have your logo, contact details and terms text ready, so that nothing is waiting on you by the time the portal is ready to switch on.

Question 4

Can I let my customers pay part of the trip now and the rest closer to their travel date on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can offer part payment on your portal, though it suits some products much better than others. The money side belongs to you, so you are free to take a deposit at the time of booking, record it against the trip, and collect the balance later. The software will show you what has been paid and what is still outstanding on each booking. The real limit comes from the supplier rather than from your website. Most airline tickets have to be paid for and issued at the time of booking, so if you accept only a deposit on a flight you are carrying the rest of the cost yourself until your customer pays you. Hotels are usually easier, because many rates can be cancelled free until a certain date, or are settled by the guest at the property, so a deposit sits comfortably alongside them. Your own holiday packages are the simplest of all, since you set the payment terms yourself. On the portal you can decide how much the first payment should be, either as a share of the trip cost or as a fixed amount, and send your customer a secure link when the balance falls due. The booking stays in the system marked as part paid, and you get a reminder before the due date so it is not forgotten. Which of these options are switched on for you will depend on your plan and on the payment gateway you have connected, so please confirm that with us rather than assuming. Before you advertise part payment to your customers, look at the payment and cancellation deadlines on the rates you sell most often, and decide how much of the trip cost you are willing to carry yourself until the balance comes in.

Question 5

Can I put the flight and hotel search on the website I already have instead of setting up a whole new portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can add the booking search to the website you already run instead of replacing it. The usual way this is done is with a small piece of code that you or your web person paste into a page on your existing site. That code loads the search box, and when a customer searches, the results and the booking steps appear either inside that page or on a linked page that carries your branding. Your current pages, your menu and your content stay exactly as they are. How smoothly this goes depends on how your website was built and on the plan you are on. Most ordinary websites, including the common site builders, accept this kind of code without any trouble. Some builders limit what code you are allowed to add, and a few older custom sites need the theme touched by whoever built it, so it is worth asking your web person to take a look before you commit to it. Keep in mind that the search results, the prices and the booking rules still come from the suppliers behind the search, so what a customer can book on your own site is the same as what they would see on a full portal. The look of the search box, your logo, your colours and your fonts can usually be matched to your site so the whole thing feels like one website to the customer rather than two. The next thing to do is check who looks after your current website and whether you are able to add code to a page, then ask us for the search code for the services you actually sell so you can try it on a quiet test page first.

Question 6

Will I be able to see the cancellation charges for a flight before my customer books it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will see the cancellation and change charges for a fare before your customer pays, but how much detail you get depends on the airline and the supplier behind the search. When your portal searches for flights, each result usually comes back with the fare rules attached, or with a small extra call that fetches the rules for that one fare. Those rules tell you whether the ticket is refundable, how much the airline keeps if the customer cancels, what it costs to change the travel date, and whether any part of the fare is lost whatever happens. Your portal can show that text on the review page, so your customer reads it before entering card details. The honest limit is that airlines do not all write these rules the same way. Some send a clean set of conditions your portal can display neatly, and some send long blocks of text written for airline staff rather than for travellers. Low cost carriers in particular often give very short rules, and a few send nothing useful at all through the API. In those cases the safest thing to show is that the fare is non refundable, or that charges apply as per the airline policy, rather than something specific that might turn out to be wrong. It is also worth remembering that the airline can apply its own handling charge on top, and that anything your agency charges for the cancellation is separate and should be shown separately so nobody is surprised later. Before you go live, run a few test searches on the routes you sell most and read what the fare rules actually say, so you know what your customers will see.

Question 7

Will my customers get automatic emails about their trip, like a reminder before they travel, or do I have to send those myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the software can send messages to your customers on its own, and in most setups that covers the booking confirmation, the ticket or voucher, and a reminder a few days before the travel date. You write the wording once, add your agency name and logo, and the system sends it each time a booking reaches that stage, so your staff do not have to remember to do it by hand. What you can send beyond email depends on your plan and on what you have connected. Text messages and WhatsApp normally need a separate account with a messaging provider, because the phone networks charge for every message sent and they will not deliver without that account in place. If you want your customers reached that way as well as by email, it is worth asking about it before you go live, so the setup and the cost are clear from the start. There are also limits that come from the supplier rather than from the software. If an airline moves a flight or a hotel cancels a room, your customer can only be told once the supplier passes that news on, and some suppliers are slower at this than others. For anything urgent, most agencies still prefer to look at the booking themselves and call the customer rather than trust an automatic message to arrive in time. The useful next step is to write down which messages you want your customers to receive and at what point in the trip, then check that list against what your plan includes, so you know what happens on its own and what your team still needs to handle.

Question 8

Can I ask for a special meal or a wheelchair for my customer when I book their flight through the API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. When you send a booking to the flight booking API you can normally include a special service request along with the passenger details, so a vegetarian meal, a child meal or a wheelchair at the airport is passed to the airline as part of the same booking and your staff do not have to ring anyone separately. What you can ask for depends on the airline and on the fare your customer has chosen. Full service carriers usually accept a decent range of meal and assistance requests. Many low cost airlines treat a meal as a paid extra rather than a request, so there you are buying something rather than asking for it, and a few of them will not take assistance requests through the API at all. Your supplier also decides which of these it passes on, so the list you can actually use may be shorter than what the airline offers at its own counter. The important thing to tell your customer is that a special request is a request and not a guarantee. The airline may hold it as pending until close to departure, and wheelchair or medical assistance in particular is often confirmed by the airline directly rather than in the booking record you can see on your screen. Requests also need to go in at the time of booking or shortly after, because trying to add one a day before the flight often fails. Before you promise anything to a customer, check with your supplier which request codes are available on the airlines you sell most, and make it a habit to ask anyone who needs medical or mobility help to confirm it with the airline as well.

Question 9

What kind of support do I get if my portal stops working at night when my customers are trying to book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, there is support outside normal office hours, but how quickly someone gets back to you depends on the plan you are on and on what has actually gone wrong. It helps to know that a problem at night is usually one of two things. Either something on your own portal is not behaving, which is ours to look at and put right, or a supplier system is down or refusing bookings, which we can confirm for you but cannot fix, because the fare and the room sit with the supplier and not with us. When a supplier is having trouble, the honest answer is that searches and bookings coming from that one supplier will keep failing until they recover, and the most we can do is tell you what we are seeing and, where your setup allows, let your portal carry on selling from your other suppliers in the meantime. When you do report something, send the exact time it happened, the search or booking reference if there is one, and a screenshot of what your customer saw on the screen. That one message saves a great deal of time, because without it the first job is always to make the problem happen again before anyone can look at it properly. Before you go live, ask what support hours and response times are included in your plan, and make sure your staff know exactly where to send an urgent report at night instead of waiting until the office opens the next morning.

Question 10

If the same hotel comes from more than one supplier, will my customers see it listed twice on my portal?

Accepted Answer

No, in most cases they will not see it twice, because the hotel booking API tries to recognise when the same property is coming from more than one supplier and show it as a single hotel on your results page. This is usually called property mapping, and it works by comparing the hotel name, the address, the position on the map and any reference codes the suppliers happen to share. Matching is never perfect, though, and it is only fair to say so. Suppliers spell hotel names differently, write addresses in their own formats, and sometimes place the same building at slightly different points on the map. Small guest houses, apartments and newly opened properties are the hardest to match, because their names change often and several of them can sit at the same address. So every now and then a property does slip through and appears twice on your portal, normally with different photos and a different rate. When more than one supplier is offering the same room, you generally have some say in what your customers see. You can show only the cheaper option, or keep both rates on the same hotel page so your customer can compare what is included, since one supplier may allow free cancellation where the other does not. How much of this you can control depends on your plan and on which suppliers your account is connected to. The best thing to do next is to run a few searches for the cities you sell most and look for hotels appearing more than once, then pass those property names to your support team so the mapping can be corrected for you.