Question 1

Can my customers log in to my portal and see their own bookings without having to call my office?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can give your customers their own login on your portal so they can look at their past and upcoming trips whenever they want, without ringing your office. Once a customer registers, the bookings they make through the portal are tied to that account. When they log in they can normally see the booking reference, the travel dates, the passenger names and the current status of the trip, and download or print their voucher, electronic ticket or invoice. For many agencies this is the part that saves the most time, because the calls asking you to resend a confirmation slowly stop coming in. What a customer is allowed to do from that account, beyond looking, is up to you and up to the supplier. You can let travellers ask for a change or a cancellation from their account, and that arrives with your staff as a request rather than going straight to the airline or the hotel, so nothing gets cancelled by accident. Whether the change can be made at all still depends on the fare rules or the hotel policy behind that particular booking, so be careful not to promise anything on the account page itself. Bookings you took offline and typed in later will only appear in a customer's account if they are entered under that same customer record, so it helps to be consistent about that from the first day. Decide how much you want customers to handle themselves before you turn the account area on, then create a test customer login, make a practice booking and read the portal as your customer would see it.

Question 2

Can the software save my regular customers' passport and travel details so my staff do not have to type them in again for every booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it usually can. The software keeps a profile for each customer, so once you have sold a trip to someone their name as it appears on the document, date of birth, nationality, passport number and expiry date, and their contact details can be stored against that profile and pulled back the next time they travel. In practice your staff start a new booking, search the customer by name or phone number, pick the right profile, and the passenger fields fill in on their own. You can keep more than one traveller under a single customer, which helps with a family that always travels together or a company whose staff you book for often. Everything stays editable before you send the booking, and that matters, because passports expire and an airline will reject a document that is out of date or spelled differently to the ticket. There are honest limits. Which fields are saved depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up, and some suppliers insist that document details are entered at the time of booking rather than accepting a stored value, so a profile saves typing without removing the check. Holding passenger documents also brings you under the data protection rules of your own country, so keep only what you need for booking and decide which staff are allowed to see it. Access can be limited by the role you give each login. The next thing to check is which passenger fields your booking form saves today, and what a normal staff login can see when it opens a saved profile, so you can set permissions the way you want before your customer list grows.

Question 3

What happens if the flight price changes between the time my customer searches and the time they actually pay?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the price your customer sees in the search results can change before the booking is paid for, and a flight booking API is built to tell you about that rather than let it surprise you afterwards. Airline fares are live. The seats and fares that come back in a search are what was available at that moment, and they can be taken by someone else while your customer is still typing in passenger details. Because of this, a flight booking API has a price check step, sometimes called revalidation, that you call after the customer has picked a flight and before you confirm the booking. That step goes back to the airline or the supplier and returns the fare as it stands right then, together with the current rules for baggage and changes. How a change is handled depends on the supplier and on the airline. Some will simply return the new fare and let you carry on, some will refuse the booking and ask you to search again, and some will hold the quoted fare for a short window once the booking has been started. Your portal can be set to show the new fare to the customer and ask them to accept it before payment is taken, which is the safest way to avoid an argument later. Whether all of that is available to you depends on the suppliers connected to your account and on your plan. Before you go live, ask each of your suppliers what their price check step returns and how long a quoted fare stays valid, and make sure your booking screen asks the customer to confirm once more if the fare has moved.

Question 4

Can I connect my own payment gateway so my customers' card payments go straight into my own bank account?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can connect your own payment gateway so the money your customers pay lands in your own account rather than passing through anyone else on the way. At the checkout step your portal hands the customer over to the gateway, the gateway collects the card details and confirms the payment, and the settlement then goes to whatever bank account you have registered with that gateway. What you need first is a merchant account with a gateway that can be connected to your portal. Many of the well known gateways can be added, but not every gateway in every country, so it is worth checking before you commit to a particular provider or sign a contract with them. Once you have the account, you will be asked for the keys or credentials the gateway issues you, and those are saved against your portal so the checkout knows where to send each payment. One thing to be clear about is that the gateway sets its own rules, not us. The charges it takes, the currencies and card types it accepts, how many days the money takes to reach your bank, and the way refunds and chargebacks are handled all come from your own agreement with the gateway. When a refund is due, the money normally goes back by the same route it came in, so both the gateway and the travel supplier have a say in how quickly your customer actually sees it. Before you apply for a merchant account, check which gateways are supported for your country and your plan, and once it is switched on, put through one small test booking to confirm the payment reaches the account you expect.

Question 5

Can I hold a hotel room for my customer for a few hours before they pay for it?

Accepted Answer

Not usually. Most hotel rates that come through a booking API are either confirmed straight away or not at all, so the room is only yours once the booking is actually committed. Some suppliers do allow a hold, sometimes called a provisional booking, where the room is blocked for a set period and you confirm it later, but that is the exception rather than the normal way hotel rates work, and it will only be offered on the rates where the supplier permits it. What you can always do is save the search result and send your customer a quote. A saved price is not a held room though. Both availability and price can move between the moment you searched and the moment you book, so if the customer comes back later in the day that exact rate may be gone or may cost more. The system rechecks the rate before it confirms the booking, so you will not end up selling a room that no longer exists, but you may have to go back to the customer with a new price. Many agencies get around this by looking for a rate that can be cancelled free of charge up to a certain date. You book it properly, so the room is genuinely held in the guest name, and if the customer changes their mind you cancel inside the free window. That gives you a real hold rather than a promise, although you do have to pay or use your credit with the supplier at the time of booking. The simplest next step is to ask which of the suppliers connected to your account support provisional bookings, and in the meantime get into the habit of checking whether a free cancellation rate covers what you need.

Question 6

Can I show prices and take payment in my own local currency if my suppliers quote me in a different one?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually show your prices in the currency your customers are comfortable with, even when the supplier quotes you in a different one. The software keeps a conversion rate for each currency you want to sell in, and it applies that rate to the supplier price before your customer sees it. You stay in control of how that rate is set and how the result is rounded, so the amounts on screen look tidy rather than odd. Your own markup or service fee is applied on top in the same way, so you are not converting anything by hand on every search. Where you need to be careful is the difference between what your customer sees and what you are actually charged. The supplier will still bill you in its own currency, and the rate it uses on the day may not match the rate you displayed. On most bookings that gap is small, but it is real, and it is worth watching on expensive bookings and on refunds, where money can come back at a different rate than the one you sold at. Some suppliers also support only certain currencies, so the list you can offer depends on the supplier and on your plan. On the payment side, the currency your customer can actually pay in depends on your payment gateway and the bank behind it, not on the portal. If your gateway settles in one currency only, the card will be charged in that currency and your customer's own bank may apply its own conversion on top. A good next step is to list the currencies you want to sell in, check which of them your suppliers and your gateway both support, and agree your conversion rate and rounding rules before you go live.

Question 7

Can I change the date on a flight ticket I already booked through the API, or does my customer have to cancel and buy a new one?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases you can change the date on a ticket through the API, but it depends on the airline and on the fare your customer bought. The API lets you send a change request against an existing booking, and it comes back telling you whether a change is allowed, what the new options are, and what the change will cost. Cheaper fares are often sold with no changes permitted, and for those the only route is to cancel, if the fare even allows that, and book again. Where a change is allowed, the usual flow is to ask the API what the fare rules say, then request the new date, then confirm it. Your customer normally pays the difference in fare plus whatever the airline charges for making the change. The API shows you both parts before you commit, so you can tell your customer the full amount and get their agreement before anything is confirmed. There are limits worth knowing. Some low cost airlines and some suppliers do not support changes through the API at all, even when the same airline allows a change on its own website, and in those cases your team has to go to the airline or the supplier directly. Changes very close to departure, or after check in has opened, are often refused. A change of passenger name is a separate matter again, and most airlines do not permit it on a ticket that has already been issued. Before you promise a date change to a customer, pull up the fare rules for that booking through the API and read what they say about changes, then quote the amount the API gives you rather than an amount you expect it to be.

Question 8

Can I sell my own holiday packages on my white label portal alongside the flights and hotels that come from the suppliers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can put your own holiday packages on your white label portal and show them next to the live flight and hotel results that come from the suppliers. Most agencies do this by building the package in the back office, with their own title, photos, day by day itinerary, what is included and what is not, and their own price. You then choose where it appears on the portal, such as a featured section on the home page or its own page that you can share on social media. Customers look at those packages the same way they look at a hotel, and when they enquire or book, it lands in the same booking list as everything else, so your team is not working in two places. The honest limit is that a package you build yourself is your own content, not live supplier content. Nothing behind the scenes checks that the hotel still has rooms on those dates or that the airfare is still available, so you set the price and you keep the dates, the availability and the wording up to date. How much of the package builder you get, and whether a customer can pay online for a package or only send an enquiry, depends on your plan, so it is worth asking before you plan a big launch. If a package is meant to include a flight, that part usually still has to be priced and confirmed by your team rather than picked up automatically. A good next step is to list the packages you already sell offline, then ask which plan covers the package builder and decide who on your side will keep that content current.

Question 9

Can I send my customer a price quote for a trip before they book, and turn it into a booking later if they say yes?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can put a quote together before your customer commits, and turn it into a real booking later. You search as normal, pick the flights or the hotel you want to offer, add your service fee, and save it as a quote under that customer's name. It goes out to them as a neat proposal with your agency name and logo on it, so it looks like your own document rather than a copy of a search screen. The one thing to be clear about is that a quote is not a held price. Airlines and hotel suppliers keep changing what they offer, so when your customer comes back a few days later and says yes, the system has to search again and the amount can come out different, or the room type you offered may have gone. Some fares can be held for a short period, but that depends on the airline or the supplier and on the plan you are on, so please do not promise your customer a locked price unless you have checked that it is genuinely on hold. All your quotes sit in one list, so you can see which ones are still open, follow them up, and see which of your staff sent them. When the customer agrees you can carry the quote through to a booking without typing the passenger details again. Whether it goes through in one step depends on the same option still being available at that moment. The best way to judge it is to build a quote for a trip you actually sell, send it to yourself first, and check that the layout, the wording and your fee all read the way you want before any customer sees one.

Question 10

Do the hotel results from the API come with photos and descriptions, or do I have to find all of that myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, hotel results from the API normally come with photos and descriptions, so you do not have to go and collect that material yourself. Most hotel APIs split the information into two parts. The search call returns prices, room names and availability, and a separate content call returns the property description, the address, the star rating, the facility list and the image links. Because the descriptive material rarely changes, it is common to pull it once and store it on your own side, then refresh it every so often. That keeps your pages loading quickly and means your search results are not waiting on a second lookup before anything appears on screen. How good the material is depends entirely on the supplier behind each property. Some suppliers send a generous set of images with captions, room level photos and a clear write up in several languages. Others send a short paragraph, a few pictures of the lobby and nothing specific to the room your customer is actually booking. Independent and smaller properties tend to be thinner than chain hotels, and a description written for one market does not always read well for yours. You are also expected to follow the supplier's rules on how their images and text may be shown, so you cannot always crop, edit or reuse them freely. Before you launch, pick a sample of properties in the destinations you sell most and look at what actually arrives for them, then ask which content fields are included on your plan and whether you are allowed to add your own photos or wording where the supplier's version is too thin.