Question 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

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 7

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 8

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.

Question 9

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 10

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.