Question 1

Can I choose my customer's seat on the plane through the flight booking API, or do they have to do that with the airline?

Accepted Answer

Yes, with many airlines you can, but not with all of them. When an airline shares its seat map, the flight booking API shows you which seats are free, which ones have extra legroom and which ones carry a charge, and you can pick a seat while you are making the booking. When an airline does not open seat selection to agents, no seat map comes back and your customer has to choose a seat on the airline website or at check in. How it works also depends on the fare. On low cost airlines a seat is almost always a paid extra, and the API returns the cost of each seat so you can add it to the booking the same way you add baggage. On full service airlines a standard seat is often free once the ticket is issued, while exit row and front row seats are sold separately, and on the cheapest fares some airlines hold seat selection back until check in. It is safer to treat a seat as a request until the airline confirms it. If the airline changes the aircraft or reschedules the flight, the seat can move or be lost, and the API will show the new seat only after the airline updates the booking. Seats on flights that are operated by a partner airline are often not selectable through the API at all. Before you promise a seat, check which of the airlines you sell most often return a seat map in your account, and tell your customer that the seat is final only when it shows on their ticket or boarding pass.

Question 2

Can I bring my old customer and booking records into new travel agency software, or do I have to start from scratch?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can bring your old customer and booking records across, so you do not have to start again from nothing. The usual way is to export what you already hold into a spreadsheet, one row per customer or per booking, and then have that file loaded into the new system for you. Names, contact details, addresses, passport information, past trips and the notes you keep against a customer normally come over cleanly, because those are simple fields that exist on both sides. If your old records live only on paper, or scattered inside your email, someone still has to type them in, and that part cannot be automated. There is one honest limit worth knowing before you start. An old booking that is brought in arrives as a record you can read, search and report on, but it is not a live booking any more. It is not connected to the airline or the hotel, so you cannot amend or cancel it from the new system the way you could with a booking made there. Anything still to be changed has to be handled with that supplier direct. How much of the loading we can take on also depends on how tidy your file is and on your plan, so please ask rather than assume. A good next step is to export a small sample of your current records, even a few dozen rows, and send it across so we can tell you which columns will map straight over and what needs cleaning up first.

Question 3

Will my white label travel portal show up on Google so customers can find it on their own?

Accepted Answer

Yes it can, but it is not automatic and it will not happen quickly. A white label portal is a normal website, so search engines can find and list it the same way they list any other travel site. What matters most is that it runs on a domain name you own, that the pages can be read by search engines, and that there is something on them worth listing. The booking pages themselves are usually not what brings people in from a search. Search results change every time someone looks, so those pages carry very little weight. The pages that do the work are the ones you write yourself, your home page, your pages about the destinations and trips you actually sell, and any guides or articles you add. Most portals let you add and edit that kind of page, although how much control you get over titles and page addresses depends on your plan and how the portal has been set up. Be realistic about the limits. If your portal sits on an address that is not your own domain, or it opens in a separate window launched from another site, search engines will find it much harder to credit that content to your business. Travel is also very competitive online, so you are unlikely to appear above the big booking sites for broad searches. Smaller and more specific searches, such as a particular kind of tour starting from your own town, are where a small agency can realistically be found. Check first that your portal is running on your own domain name and that you can edit your own page titles and text, then ask your provider what else can be changed before you spend anything on promoting it.

Question 4

Will the flight booking API tell me if the airline changes the flight time after I have issued the ticket?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most flight booking APIs will tell you, but it does not always reach you the moment the airline makes the change. When an airline moves a departure time, changes a flight number or drops a leg, that change goes on to the booking record held by the supplier. The API then exposes it either through a booking details call that shows the new timings against what you originally sold, or through a list of changed bookings that you are meant to read regularly. What that means in practice is that your system has to go and ask. Very few suppliers push a message to you the second something moves, so the usual arrangement is a job that checks your live bookings on a schedule and flags anything that has shifted. Once it is flagged, your staff can decide whether the new timing still works for the customer, and your portal can email the customer about it automatically if you want it to. Be honest with yourself about the gaps. Very small movements in the departure time are often not reported at all, a change made close to departure may reach your customer through the airline's own message before it reaches you, and some suppliers only report a change when you ask about that booking rather than in a list. A cancellation on the day of travel is still usually best sorted out by phone with the airline. Ask whoever supplies your flight content which call returns schedule changes and how often they expect you to read it, then set your own checks to match that.

Question 5

Can my travel agency software show me a report of how my sales are going and which trips sell best?

Accepted Answer

Yes, reporting is a standard part of travel agency software, and you can normally see your sales for a chosen period broken down in several ways without having to build a spreadsheet yourself. The reports most agencies use day to day look at the same booking data from different angles. You can usually see what was sold in a date range, split by product such as flights, hotels or packages, by the member of staff who made the sale, by supplier, and by destination. Because your own markup is held against each booking, the reports can show you gross sales and what you actually earned on them, so you can tell the difference between a busy month and a profitable one. Most systems also let you pick a period and compare it with the same period last year. There are honest limits. A report can only show what is recorded in the system, so bookings you made directly with a supplier and never entered will not appear, and refunds or amendments only show correctly once they have been processed rather than just agreed on the phone. How far back you can look, and whether you can design your own report layouts or only use the ready made ones, can depend on your plan. A good next step is to decide the two or three questions you want answered every month, then check that the reports available to you answer them before you change how you record anything.

Question 6

Can I add the booking engine to the website I already have instead of running a separate booking site?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can keep the website you already have and add the booking engine to it, so your customers never feel that they have left your brand. The usual way is to place a small piece of code on one of your pages, or to point part of your own web address, such as a booking section of your domain, at the portal. Your menu, your logo and your colours stay as they are, and the search and booking steps appear inside that page. Which method suits you depends on how your current website is built. A site built on a common website builder or content system will normally accept the code without trouble. A very old site, or one locked down by the company that built it for you, may not let you add code at all, and in that case pointing a web address at the hosted portal is the simpler route. Card payments and some suppliers also expect the booking pages to sit on a secure address, so a valid certificate on your domain is needed either way. It is worth being realistic about the look. The booking pages can be matched closely to your fonts and colours, but they will not always be an exact copy of a custom designed site, and every extra styling change takes time to set up. Search results deserve a thought too, because pages that load inside another page are not always read by search engines in the same way as an ordinary page on your site. The next thing to check is who controls your current website today and whether you are able to edit its pages or its domain settings, then pass that detail on when you ask for the booking engine to be connected.

Question 7

Can my travel agency software pass my bookings into my accounting software so I do not have to enter everything twice?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software can hand your booking and invoice details over to your accounting package, so the same sale does not have to be typed in twice. Once a booking is confirmed and an invoice is raised, it can go across as a sales entry with the customer name, the invoice number, the tax and the amount already filled in. How that link is made depends on which accounting package you use. Some popular packages can be connected directly, so entries flow across on their own or at the press of a button. Where there is no direct connection, the usual answer is an export file that you or your accountant upload into the accounts each week or each month, which is often enough for a small agency. There are limits worth knowing. A direct connection is not available for every package, and it can depend on your plan and on the version of the accounts you run. The first setup needs care as well, because someone has to decide which ledger and which tax code each kind of sale belongs to, and that is a conversation with your accountant rather than something the software should guess. Refunds, cancellations and supplier bills usually need their own rules too. A good next step is to note which accounting package you use, which version, and whether your accountant works in it alongside you, then ask us what kind of link is possible for that package on your plan.

Question 8

Can the flight booking API show me how long the stop is between connecting flights and whether my customer has to change airport?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it can. Every result comes back with each leg of the journey listed separately, with its arrival and departure time, so your booking screen can work out the gap at each stop and show it to your customer in hours and minutes. The airport for every leg is listed too, so when the flight lands at one airport and the next one leaves from another airport in the same city, you can see that before you sell. What you do with that is your choice. Most agents set a shortest connection time and hide or flag anything below it, because a stop that looks fine on paper can be hard work in a large airport where your customer has to clear immigration, collect a bag and check in again. Airport changes are worth showing clearly as well, since getting across a city means a taxi or a train and time your customer has not planned for. The part to be careful about is a journey put together from two separate tickets. When the whole trip is on one ticket, the airline is responsible for your customer if the first flight runs late and the connection is missed. When the API has joined two fares into one itinerary, a delay on the first flight is your customer's problem and the second airline does not have to do anything about it. The search result normally tells you which of the two you are looking at, and that is worth checking before you confirm anything. Decide the shortest stop you are comfortable selling, set that as a rule in your search, then look at a few long journeys with connections to see how the stop time and any airport change appear to your customers.

Question 9

Can the hotel booking API give me guest reviews and ratings so my customer can judge a hotel before booking?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes yes, but this is one of the areas where suppliers differ the most, so you cannot assume every hotel in your portal will come with reviews. Where review content is included you usually get an overall guest score, the number of reviews it is based on, and often a breakdown by things travellers care about such as cleanliness, location, the staff and value. Some suppliers also send the written reviews themselves, with the date and the type of traveller. Keep in mind that this guest score is a different thing from the star rating, which is the official classification of the property and tends to come through on almost every feed. The limits are mostly commercial rather than technical. Review content is often licensed from a separate provider, so it may only be part of certain plans, and the supplier may set rules about how you display it, such as crediting where it came from or not mixing scores from different sources into one number of your own. Reviews are also not always available in every language, and a small or newly listed hotel may simply have none yet, which is not a fault in the feed. If reviews are important to the way your customers choose, ask which of your suppliers include review content and what the display rules are, then look at a mix of large chain hotels and smaller properties in your own portal to see how often a score actually appears.

Question 10

Can I work on my bookings from my phone when I am out of the office?

Accepted Answer

Yes, for most day to day jobs. Travel agency software is normally reached through a web browser, so you can sign in from a phone or a tablet while you are out and look up a booking, see what a customer has paid, send a quote again or answer a question about a flight time. Screens built for a desktop are narrower on a phone, so you will scroll more, but the information you see is the same information your team sees in the office. The heavier work is harder on a small screen. Running a fresh search and issuing a ticket, editing a long itinerary or reading through a report is far easier on a proper monitor, and some suppliers open their own page for payment or card details which can be fiddly on a phone. If your software offers an app as well as the website, the app usually covers the common jobs rather than every screen, so check which parts it actually includes. It is worth thinking about access when your staff use their own phones. Give each person only the permissions the job needs, make sure everyone signs out properly on a personal or shared device, and ask whether your plan lets you control who can sign in from outside your office, because that can depend on the plan you are on. The simplest next step is to sign in on your own phone and try the two or three things you most often need to do when you are away from your desk, so you know in advance which of them work comfortably and which are better left until you are back.