Question 1

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.

Question 2

Can I get the airline booking reference and ticket number through the API as soon as a booking is made so I can send them to my customer?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can get both straight from the API, and you do not need to log into the airline site to find them. When a booking goes through, the reply from the API normally includes the airline booking reference, the short code your customer sees on their itinerary. The ticket number is slightly different, because it only exists once the ticket has actually been issued. With many low cost carriers, booking and ticketing happen in the same step, so the reference and the ticket number come back together. With content that comes through a global distribution system, ticketing is often a separate call, so the reference arrives first and the ticket number a moment later, once issuance is confirmed. This does depend on the supplier and on how your account is set up. A few suppliers return the reference immediately but hold the ticket number until their own issuance finishes, and now and then a booking sits in a manual queue on their side and takes longer. In those cases you read the booking again with the same reference and the number is there. Because of that, it is safer to save the reference against your booking record as soon as you have it, then fill in the ticket number when it arrives, rather than waiting for both before you store anything. Once you are connected, make a test booking in the sandbox and look at exactly which fields come back in the booking response, then ask your supplier whether ticket numbers are returned in that same response or need a separate retrieve call, so your confirmation emails never go out with a blank ticket number.

Question 3

Can I add bookings I made offline, like over the phone or by email, into the software so all my bookings are in one place?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually add offline bookings into travel agency software so everything sits in one place. A manual booking entry screen lets you type in the passenger name, the travel dates, the supplier, the cost you paid and the amount you charged your customer, and the system then treats that record much like a booking made through the portal itself. This matters most for the parts of your business the portal does not handle for you. A hotel you booked directly over the phone, a bus or rail ticket bought locally, a visa fee, a sightseeing tour arranged with a ground operator, all of these can be entered against the same customer file, so your invoice, your receipts and your reports show the whole trip instead of only the flight. There are limits worth knowing before you rely on it. A manually entered booking is only as accurate as what you type, because the system has no live link to that supplier, so it cannot refresh the status, pull a cancellation policy or process a refund for you. If the supplier changes something later you have to come back and update the record yourself. Which fields you get, and whether you can attach a supplier voucher to the record, also depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up. The next thing to do is open the manual booking screen on your own portal and enter one past booking all the way through, then check how it appears on the customer invoice and in your sales report. If a field you need is missing, ask for it to be added before you start moving your older records across.

Question 4

Can I offer my white label portal in more than one language so my customers can book in the language they speak?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label portal can be shown in more than one language, and your customer normally picks the one they want from a small switch at the top of the page. Once they choose, the search screens, the buttons and the messages along the way appear in that language, and the choice stays with them while they finish the booking. The parts that come from us, which is most of the wording you see around the search and booking steps, can be translated for the languages you need. Anything you have written yourself, such as your terms, your about page or your cancellation notes, you supply in each language you want to offer, because only you know how you word those things for your own customers. There are limits it is better to know up front. How many languages you can switch on, and which ones are ready to use, can depend on your plan, so please check rather than assume. More importantly, the text that arrives from suppliers stays in the language the supplier sends it in, and that is very often English. Hotel descriptions, room names and fare conditions are good examples. If a booking hands your customer to a supplier for payment, that page will also be in the supplier's own wording. A sensible next step is to decide which one or two languages your customers really book in, make a list of the pages you wrote yourself so they can be translated, and confirm your plan covers the languages you have in mind.

Question 5

Can I book flights for children and infants through the API, or do I have to call the airline for those passengers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can book children and infants through the API in most cases, as long as you send the correct passenger type and date of birth with the booking. When you search, you say how many adults, children and infants are travelling, and you say whether each infant has a seat of their own or is sitting on an adult's lap. The fares that come back are already priced for that mix, so the child fare or infant fare appears as its own line instead of you having to guess a discount. At booking you send each passenger's date of birth, and the airline checks the traveller is still inside the age band on the day of travel, not on the day you made the booking. There are limits worth knowing before you quote. Airlines set their own age bands, so a traveller counted as a child by one carrier can be charged as an adult by another and the same family will price differently on two options. An infant cannot travel without an adult on the same booking, and most airlines allow only one lap infant per adult. Children flying alone are usually not sold through an API at all, because the airline wants its own form and fee handled directly with them. Which passenger types your account can send also depends on the supplier behind that fare and on your plan. Before you quote a family trip, price it once in your test environment using the real ages, check the child and infant lines separately, and confirm with the airline if any traveller has a birthday falling close to the travel dates.

Question 6

Can I give each of my staff members their own login with different levels of access so not everyone can see all the bookings and reports?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software lets you create a separate login for each person on your team and then decide what each one is allowed to see and do. The usual way this works is through roles. You set up a role such as booking agent, accountant or manager, you tick what that role is allowed to open, and then you put each staff member into a role. A booking agent might be able to search, quote and book, but not view your markup rules or your commission settings. An accountant might see invoices and payments but not be able to change supplier settings. A manager might see everything, including reports. Because it works by role rather than by person, adding someone later is quick, you just place them in the right role instead of setting up permissions from scratch. How far you can narrow things down depends on your plan and on how your portal is set up. Some setups let you restrict access right down to a single screen or a single supplier, others give you a smaller set of ready made roles to pick from. Separating one branch or office from another, so that staff in one office cannot see the other office's bookings, is usually possible too, but that is worth confirming for your own setup rather than assuming. Before you invite your team in, write down who genuinely needs to see pricing, commissions and customer payment details, and who only needs to make bookings. Then ask us to walk you through the roles available on your plan so we can match them to that list.

Question 7

Can I search for hotels near a specific landmark or address through the API instead of only by city name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can search around a specific point instead of only by city name. Hotel booking APIs usually accept a latitude and longitude together with a radius, and many also accept a landmark or an address that they turn into a point for you. So if your customer wants a room near a conference centre, a hospital or a beach, you can send that location and get back only the properties that sit within the distance you asked for. How well it works depends on the supplier behind the search. Some suppliers hold accurate coordinates for every property and will even sort the results by distance from your point. Others hold only a rough location for smaller hotels, or support searching by city and area alone, so a radius search quietly widens to the whole city or comes back empty. If you are connected to more than one supplier, you may see this work well for one and poorly for another, which is normal and not a fault in your portal. There are two limits worth knowing before you promise it to a customer. The distance a supplier reports is almost always a straight line, not a walking or driving distance, so a property that looks close can still be awkward to reach by road. Address searching also depends on the address being written the way the supplier expects, so a vague or misspelt address can pull in the wrong area. The useful next step is to run the same landmark search against each supplier you have switched on and compare what comes back, and to check with us which of your connections support coordinate and radius search before you build it into the way you sell.

Question 8

Can I cancel a flight ticket and get my customer a refund through the API, or do I have to contact the airline myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can cancel a flight booking and start the refund through the flight booking API, without calling the airline yourself. You send a cancel request with the booking reference, and the response tells you whether the cancellation went through and what penalty the airline is holding back, so your team can handle it from your own portal. How far you can go depends on the fare and the supplier. Some fares are non refundable, so you only get taxes back, and a few give back nothing. Low cost carriers often do not allow cancellation through the API at all, and those have to be done on the airline side. Timing matters too, because once the flight has departed or the ticket has passed its time limit, the API will usually refuse the request and it becomes a manual claim with the airline. It also helps to keep cancelling and refunding apart in your head. Cancelling stops the travel. The refund is money moving, and that takes longer, because the airline has to process it and then it has to reach the card or account that paid. The API can confirm the refund was requested and what was approved, but it cannot make the money arrive sooner. Before you promise this to a customer, read the cancellation rules that come back with each fare at search and booking time, and ask your supplier which airlines support cancellation through the API and which need to be done by hand. Knowing that in advance saves an awkward call with someone expecting an instant refund.

Question 9

Can I use travel agency software to let my customers book trips in installments or split payments across multiple cards?

Accepted Answer

Yes, many travel agency software platforms support flexible payment options including installment plans and split payments, but the exact features depend on which plan you choose and which payment processors you have connected to your system. When you set up payment options in your software, you can typically configure how many installments a customer can spread their booking across, what the payment schedule looks like, and whether there are any fees for paying in installments. Some systems let customers choose their own payment dates within a window you set, while others follow a fixed schedule you create. Split payments across multiple cards usually work through your payment processor, which handles charging different cards for different portions of the total cost. Keep in mind that your payment processor may have limits on how many installments you can offer or how long the payment period can be. Some processors charge extra fees for installment plans, which might affect your profit margin on those bookings. You should check with your payment provider about their rules before you advertise installment options to your customers. Look at your software's payment settings to see what installment and split payment options are already available, and contact your payment processor to confirm what they support and what fees they charge.

Question 10

Can I use the flight booking API to search for round trip flights with flexible dates so my customers can see which days have the cheapest fares?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the flight booking API supports flexible date searches so your customers can explore different travel dates and find the lowest prices. When you set up a search, you can request results across a range of dates rather than just one specific outbound and return date. This helps your customers understand the cost difference between traveling on different days, which is especially useful when they have some flexibility in when they want to go. How the flexible search works depends on what your customers are looking for. Some travelers want to see all the options for an entire month so they can pick the absolute cheapest days to travel. Others might have a rough timeframe, like early September or late October, and want to compare prices within that window. The API can handle both of these scenarios, showing you fares across multiple date combinations so your customers can make an informed decision. Keep in mind that flexible date searches return more results than a single date search, which means the response takes longer and uses more data. You may want to think about how you present all these options to your customers so they can find the best deal without getting overwhelmed by information. Some travel businesses show a calendar view where customers can see prices for each day at a glance, while others show a simple list sorted by price. To set up flexible date searches for your customers, check the API documentation to see which date range parameters are available and how to structure your requests, then test with a few sample searches to make sure the results look right for your business.