Question 1

Can I add my own markup or service fee to the prices my customers see on my white label portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can add your own markup or service fee on top of the prices your customers see on your white label portal. The supplier price comes in as the starting point, and whatever margin you set sits on top of it, so the person booking sees one final price rather than your cost and your fee side by side. If you would rather show the fee openly as a separate service charge, that is usually possible too. Most setups let you decide how the margin works. You can apply a fixed amount on each booking, or a share of the fare, and you can normally set different rules for flights, hotels and other products, since the margin you work on is rarely the same across them. If other agents book through your portal, you can usually give them their own margin as well, so they earn something while you still keep yours. There are limits worth being honest about. Some suppliers and some fare types do not allow the displayed fare to be altered, and in those cases your fee has to sit as a separate charge instead of inside the fare. Taxes and supplier charges are not yours to change and stay exactly as the supplier sends them. How much control you get also depends on the plan you are on and on the contracts behind each supplier connection. Before you start selling, decide your markup rules product by product and run a few test searches, so you can check that the final price your customer sees is the one you expected.

Question 2

Can I let other small travel agents book through my portal and set a credit limit for each of them?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. Alongside your own staff logins, you can add other agents underneath your account as sub agents. Each one gets their own login and books through your portal, seeing your brand and the prices you decide to show them rather than the raw supplier price. Their bookings still come through to you, so you keep a full view of everything sold under your business. Credit limits are part of that setup. You choose an amount for each agent, and every booking they make is taken off what they have left. When the limit is used up, the agent cannot confirm anything new until they settle with you or you raise the limit again. Many agencies prefer to work the other way round and ask sub agents to keep a topped up balance in advance, which works in much the same way and carries less risk for you. How far you can go with this depends on your plan and on how your suppliers are set up. Things like different markup rules for different groups of agents, or letting agents pay you online instead of by transfer, are not always available everywhere, and online collection in particular depends on the payment options supported in your country. It is also worth remembering that you stay responsible to the supplier for whatever your agents book, so the credit limit is your main protection. Before you start, decide whether your agents will work on credit or on a prepaid balance, and how many levels of agent you really need, then check with us which of those options your current plan covers.

Question 3

Do I need my own agreement with the airlines to sell tickets through the flight booking API, or does that come through you?

Accepted Answer

In most cases no, you do not need your own agreement with each airline. The flight content reaches you through supplier connections that are already in place, and you sell under those, so you can begin taking bookings without approaching airlines one by one yourself. There are real limits to this, and they depend on your market and your plan. Some countries expect a travel business to hold a local licence, or its own accreditation, before it can issue tickets in its own name, and that is a rule you have to meet no matter whose API you use. On top of that, some airlines only release their best fares to agents who hold a direct deal with them, so those fares simply will not appear in your results until such a deal exists. Which suppliers are switched on for you also depends on the plan you are on, so two agencies can see different results for the same route. What your own airline deal changes is mainly commercial rather than technical. A direct deal can give you better fares and a better margin on the routes you sell most, and it is normally added alongside the connections you already have rather than replacing them. Until you reach that stage, you trade on the connections that come with the service, which is how a great many agencies run for years. The sensible next step is to ask which suppliers are enabled for your plan and to check what your own country requires before you issue tickets, and if there is one airline or one route you sell heavily, raise it early so a direct deal can be looked at for you.

Question 4

Can I use my own web address for my white label portal instead of one that has someone else's name in it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can run on a web address that belongs to you rather than one carrying another company name. Most travel businesses point either their main domain or a subdomain of it, something like the word book followed by your own company name, at the portal, so the customer never leaves your brand from the moment they start searching to the moment they pay. Setting this up is mostly a small change made where you bought your domain. You add a record there that sends visitors to the portal, and a secure certificate is issued so the address shows as safe in the browser. The change is not instant, because the wider internet needs time to pick up the new setting, so it is normal for the address to work for some people a little before it works for everyone. Once it settles, the portal simply answers on your address and nothing about your daily booking work changes. There are a few honest limits. How many addresses you can attach can depend on your plan, so if you want a separate address for each brand you run, confirm that is included before you go and buy the extra domains. Sending booking emails from your own domain is a separate job, because email needs records of its own or confirmations can land in the spam folder. And if your main domain already runs a website you do not want to disturb, a subdomain is the safer choice. Check who in your business actually controls the domain settings, and whether your plan covers the number of addresses you have in mind, before you promise a launch date to your customers.

Question 5

If a hotel charges extra taxes or fees that my customer has to pay at the property, will I see those in the API before they book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will see them before the booking is made, but how much detail you get depends on the supplier behind that property. Hotel rates usually come back from the API split into what the guest pays you now and what the guest pays at the hotel. Taxes that form part of the room rate are normally included in the total you are shown, while charges like a resort fee, a city or tourist tax, or a parking charge are often collected by the property itself at check in and are listed separately from the rate. Where those extra charges exist, the API usually returns them as part of the rate details, sometimes as an amount and sometimes only as wording written by the supplier. That wording is not always in the same place for every supplier, so it is worth showing it plainly on your booking page instead of tucking it away. A guest who is asked for money at the front desk that nobody warned them about will come back to you, not to the hotel. If a supplier does not send a charge in a proper field, we cannot fill it in for them, and you will only have the text they provide. The safest way to work is to treat the amount you collect from the customer and the amount the customer will finally spend as two different numbers, and to print both on the confirmation you send out. Check a handful of the properties you sell most often in your test environment and look at what the rate details actually carry for each one, so you know before you go live which suppliers give you a clear amount and which give you only a sentence.

Question 6

Can I run more than one white label portal under different brand names from the same account?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can run more than one portal from the same account. Each one can carry its own name, its own look and its own web address, so a customer who lands on one has no idea the other exists. This suits agencies that sell leisure travel under one brand and corporate travel under another, or that want a separate site for a particular region or for a partner who wants to look independent. The portals share the same back office. Bookings from every brand land in one place, so your team does not have to log in and out to see the day's work. You can usually set different markups, show different products and offer different payment options on each portal, which is the main reason people ask for a second one. What you cannot always do is keep them completely separate, because they sit on the same supplier setup behind the scenes. How many extra portals you are allowed, and whether each one costs more, depends on your plan. Some supplier agreements also limit which brands their content may appear under, so a second portal will not automatically be able to sell everything the first one sells. That is worth confirming before you promise a partner a site of their own. If you have a second brand in mind, write down what should actually be different about it, the branding, the products, the markups and who logs in, then ask us to check what your current plan covers.

Question 7

Can I test the software with practice bookings before I start selling to real customers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can test the software with practice bookings before you go live. Most of the flight and hotel suppliers we connect to offer a test environment, sometimes called a sandbox, which behaves like the real one but does not issue a real ticket or a real hotel voucher and does not charge anyone. Your portal or your API keys can be pointed at that test environment first, so you and your staff can run searches, make bookings, cancel them and see how it all looks to a customer, without any money moving. What you can test depends on the supplier. Some give a full test environment with a decent spread of sample flights and hotels, so almost everything you want to try will work. Others give a limited one where only certain routes, cities or dates return results, and a few do not offer test access at all and expect you to start on the live system. Payment gateways are usually similar, with a test mode that accepts dummy card details. So your test setup may look a little thinner than the real thing, and that is normal rather than a fault. For that reason the usual approach is to do your learning and your staff training on test, then switch to live and make one small real booking yourself before you put the portal in front of customers. That first live booking is what proves the ticket, the voucher, the confirmation email and the payment all come out correctly, because test data cannot prove that for you. When you are ready, ask which of your connected suppliers have test access on your plan, and whether your payment gateway does too, so you know which parts you can rehearse and which you will only see once you are live.

Question 8

Can I book several rooms for a group in one booking through the API, or do I have to make a separate booking for each room?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most hotel booking APIs let you book several rooms in one go, although how far that stretches depends on the supplier you are using. When you search, you normally tell the API how many rooms you need and who is staying in each one, so the rates that come back are already priced for the whole party. You then confirm all of those rooms together and receive a single booking reference. That keeps life simpler for you, because there is one record to look at, one set of cancellation terms to read, and one voucher to pass on to your customer. There are limits worth knowing about. Suppliers usually cap how many rooms you can put into one booking, and once a party gets large the property often prefers to treat it as a proper group contract, which is arranged directly with them rather than through an online rate. Room types can differ too, so if part of your group wants twin rooms and the rest want doubles, some suppliers accept that in a single booking while others make you split it. Cancelling is the other thing to watch, because with certain suppliers the booking has to be cancelled as a whole, which is awkward when only one guest drops out. Before you promise anything to a group, make a test booking with the number and mix of rooms you expect to sell, and check whether that supplier lets you cancel or amend one room on its own.

Question 9

Will my white label portal work properly on mobile phones, since most of my customers search on their phones?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your white label portal is built to work on a mobile phone as well as on a desktop computer. It is the same website, and it rearranges itself to fit the size of the screen it is opened on, so someone on a phone gets a search form, a result list and a booking page that fit the screen and can be tapped with a thumb. You do not have to build or pay for a separate mobile version of your site. A few things do behave differently on a small screen, and it is fair to know that up front. Long hotel result lists and detailed fare breakdowns show less at a glance, so your customer may need to tap into a result to see everything you would see side by side on a laptop. Pages that come from outside the portal, such as a payment page from a bank or a supplier page a customer is sent to in certain booking flows, are controlled by that company rather than by us, so how neatly they behave on a phone depends on them. Whether you also get a phone app, instead of a mobile friendly website, depends on your plan, so please check before you promise an app to your customers. Anything you add yourself is worth checking too. Your own banners, large images or extra landing pages can slow a page down or push the layout out of shape on a narrow screen, even when the rest of the portal is fine. The simplest next step is to open your own portal on your own phone and run one real search and one test booking all the way through, on both a flight and a hotel. If a page looks wrong or a button is hard to tap, note which page it was and which phone and browser you used, and raise it so it can be checked properly.

Question 10

If I decide to stop using the software one day, can I take my customer and booking data with me?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the customer and booking records you build up belong to you, and you can take a copy away with you. Most of what an agency actually cares about, meaning the customer list, the booking history, the passenger details and the invoices you raised, can be exported as spreadsheet files that open in any ordinary program. You do not have to wait until you are leaving to ask for this, and it is sensible to pull a copy now and then while you are still trading. What comes out cleanly is the information that lives in your own account. Anything that really sits with a supplier will not travel in the same way. An airline booking reference, a hotel voucher or a ticket number is held by the airline or the hotel, so the export tells you the booking existed and what was in it, but the live booking itself stays with whoever issued it and has to be managed there. How much you can export at once, and how far back the records go, depends on your plan and on how long you have been trading with us. Large exports are usually split into batches so they finish reliably rather than timing out. Files attached to a booking, such as scanned passports or signed forms, are normally handled separately from the spreadsheet export, because they are documents rather than rows of data. If this matters to you, ask for a sample export covering a recent month, open it and check that the columns you would genuinely need are all there, and say so early if something you rely on is missing so it can be looked at long before you ever need it.