Question 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

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.

Question 7

Do the flight results I get from the API include the low cost airlines, or only the big full service carriers?

Accepted Answer

In most cases yes, low cost airlines do appear alongside the full service ones, but it helps to understand how they get there. Full service airlines are usually reached through the global distribution systems that agents have used for years. Many low cost carriers sit outside those systems and are connected directly instead, so whether a particular budget airline shows up in your results depends on which connections your supplier has switched on for your account. Because of that difference, the two can behave quite differently once a customer picks a fare. A low cost fare often has to be paid for straight away rather than held, it may come with fewer things included, and changes or refunds can be tighter and sometimes handled only by the airline itself. Baggage and seats are usually sold as extras rather than being part of the fare, so the first price on the screen can look cheaper than what the trip really costs. There is also the plain fact that not every budget airline is open to agents. A few of them sell only to the public and will not deal through agency channels at all, and no API can create a connection that the airline does not offer in the first place. The sensible next step is to ask which airlines are actually live for your account on the routes you sell most, then run a few test searches on those routes and compare the results with the airline's own site so you know exactly where the gaps are.

Question 8

Can I change a hotel booking after it is made, like the dates or the guest name, through the API, or do I have to cancel and book again?

Accepted Answer

Yes, some hotel bookings can be changed through the API, but many cannot, and which ones can depends entirely on the supplier and the rate your customer booked. Where a change is allowed, the API gives you a modification call. You send the booking reference along with the new details, such as different dates, a different number of guests, or a corrected guest name. The supplier then checks whether the room is still free on the new dates and at what rate, and answers with a fresh price. If the new dates cost more, the difference is collected. If they cost less, you may or may not see money come back, again according to that supplier's own terms. Plenty of rates, especially the cheaper ones that cannot be refunded, allow no change at all. For those the only route is to cancel, accept whatever penalty the policy carries, and make a new booking. Small corrections, like a spelling mistake in a guest name, are often treated more kindly than a date change, but even that is the supplier's decision rather than ours, and a few suppliers ask that such requests go through their own support desk instead of the API. So before you promise a customer that a stay can be moved, look at the change and cancellation terms the API returned at the time of booking and save them with the reservation. That way your staff can see at a glance which bookings are flexible and which are locked in, and nobody has to guess on the phone.

Question 9

Can I see reports on how my agency is doing, like which staff member sold the most or which destinations sell best?

Accepted Answer

Yes, travel agency software normally includes a reporting area so you can see how the business is doing without building a spreadsheet yourself. The usual reports cover bookings made over a date range, sales split by product type such as flights or hotels, sales by staff member, and which routes or destinations come up most often. In most cases you can filter by date and export what you see, so your accountant or your own team can work with the same numbers you are looking at. How deep the reporting goes depends on your plan and on what gets recorded at the time of booking. If a booking is entered by hand and nobody is tagged against it, it will not sit under the right staff member later, so the reports are only as good as the habits behind them. Anything that shows supplier commission also depends on the supplier passing that detail back, and not every supplier does, so a few of those columns may need to be completed on your side. Dashboards that refresh as bookings come in are common enough. Very custom reporting, such as combining your own offline records with portal data or matching your accounting categories exactly, is usually treated as a separate piece of setup work rather than something waiting for you on day one. A sensible next step is to write down the few numbers you actually look at each week, then ask to see those exact reports in a demo before you commit, so you know which ones come as standard and which would need building for you.

Question 10

Will my white label portal bring me customers from Google on its own, or do I still have to do my own marketing?

Accepted Answer

No, a white label portal will not bring you traffic by itself, and it is only fair to say that plainly. The portal gives people a good place to search and book once they arrive, but getting them to arrive is still your job, in the same way a shop window does not put people on the street outside. The reason is that search and results pages are built the moment a customer asks for them, from live fares and availability, so there is nothing fixed for a search engine to store and rank. Pages that do hold steady content, such as your home page, a destination page or questions and answers you write yourself, can be found in search over time, and those are the ones worth your effort. How much content you can add, and how much control you get over it, depends on your plan and on how your site is set up. The portal works best as the place people land rather than the place they discover you. Most agencies get their bookings from customers they already have, from social posts and messages, from ads pointing at a specific trip, and from being the agency people already call. Any of those can send someone straight into a search on your portal with the trip details already filled in for them. Before you launch, decide where your first visitors will come from, because a portal with nobody pointed at it will stay quiet no matter how good it looks.