Question 1

Can I book a flight for a large group on one booking, or do I have to split them up?

Accepted Answer

Usually you will have to split them up. Airlines set a limit on how many passengers can travel on a single booking, and most live booking systems follow that same limit. This is an airline rule rather than something the software decides, so the flight booking API will normally accept a party up to that limit and then ask you to create a second booking for the rest of the group. Splitting a group does work, and plenty of agents do it every day, but there are two things to watch. The seats may not be held together, so the group can end up spread around the cabin unless you select seats for each booking. The price can also move between one booking and the next if the cheaper seats sell out while you are working, so it is worth checking the fare again before you confirm the second part rather than assuming it matches the first. For genuinely large groups, most airlines prefer you to deal with their group desk instead of booking online. Group fares often come with different rules, such as paying a deposit, holding the seats longer and giving the passenger names closer to departure. That side of the business is handled directly with the airline and is not something a live booking API can do, so what usually happens is that you agree the group with the airline and then record it in your system as an offline booking so it still sits alongside everything else. If you handle groups often, check with your supplier which airlines in your setup allow the larger party sizes, and ask us to show you how to record an offline group booking so your records stay complete.

Question 2

Will the software remind me before a free cancellation date or a ticketing deadline runs out?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the software can flag those dates for you, as long as the supplier gives us the date in the first place. When you book a hotel room with free cancellation, or hold an air booking that has not been ticketed yet, the deadline normally comes back together with the booking. The software keeps it with that booking and can show it as something due soon, so you are not digging through old emails trying to work out which file needs attention first. How you actually get told depends on your setup. The usual options are a list of bookings approaching their deadline on your home screen, a label or colour on the booking itself, and an alert or email to the staff member who owns the booking or to a shared office inbox. Whether all of those are switched on for you depends on your plan and on how your portal was put together, so it is worth asking what is included rather than assuming. There is an honest limit here. Not every supplier returns a clean deadline, and some send their policy as a sentence of text rather than a date the software can read and act on. For those bookings the software can remind you that a policy exists, but it cannot promise you the exact hour. Airline ticketing time limits are the riskiest of all, because an airline can shorten them with very little warning, so treat a reminder as a help and not a guarantee. Open two or three of your recent bookings in the software and see whether a cancellation or ticketing deadline is showing against them, then tell us which reminders you want switched on and who in your office should receive them.

Question 3

Will the flight search results tell me how much luggage my customer can take, or do I have to look that up myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the flight results will show a baggage allowance, but how clear and complete it is depends on the airline and the supplier the fare comes from. For most full service carriers you can expect to see the checked allowance and the cabin allowance for each passenger, given either as a number of pieces or as a weight, and that information can be displayed on the results page or on the fare details your customer sees before paying. Where it gets less tidy is with low cost airlines and some discounted fares. Those often come back as hand baggage only, with checked bags sold separately as an optional extra, so the allowance shown is correct but small. A few airlines return the rules as a block of plain text rather than neat fields, which means it can be read but not always displayed as nicely alongside the price. Infant and child allowances are also less consistent than adult ones, so they are worth confirming for family bookings. If an airline sells bags as an extra, you can usually add them at the time of booking and the purchase will appear on the confirmation, though not every airline opens that up through an API. Where it is not available, your customer buys the bag from the airline directly, and it is better to tell them that at quote stage than let them find out at the airport. The practical step is to run searches on the routes and airlines you sell most, look at what baggage detail actually comes back, and ask us about any carrier where the information looks thin before you put it in front of customers.

Question 4

Can I book several rooms for a group on one hotel booking instead of doing them one at a time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. A hotel booking API normally lets you ask for more than one room in a single search, with the number of adults and children set separately for each room, and the results come back priced for the whole stay rather than per room. When you move to booking, you pass the lead guest for each room and the supplier returns one reservation covering all of them, which saves you repeating the same search over and over. There are real limits to be aware of. Each supplier sets its own maximum number of rooms per request, and once you go above that the hotel usually treats the enquiry as a group booking, which is handled by a contracting team rather than through the API. All the rooms also have to share the same check in and check out dates, so if half your party arrives a day early that part has to be booked separately. Room types can sometimes be mixed and sometimes not, again depending on the supplier. The other thing worth knowing is how cancellation works on a multi room reservation. Some suppliers let you cancel individual rooms, while others treat the booking as a single unit, so removing one room means cancelling and rebooking the lot. Because this varies, do not assume you can drop a room later without checking the policy that came back with the rate. Before you promise anything to a group client, run a test search for the number of rooms you expect to sell most often and read the cancellation terms returned with it, then ask us which of your connected suppliers allow room by room changes.

Question 5

Can the software send my customer their booking confirmation and voucher automatically so I don't have to type it out every time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups the software can produce and send the confirmation and voucher for you as soon as a booking is confirmed, so you are not retyping the same details for every customer. The information that comes back from the supplier, such as traveller names, travel dates, the hotel or flight details and the reference numbers, drops straight into a document template, and that template carries your agency name, logo and contact details rather than anyone else's. You can normally choose whether it goes out the moment the booking is confirmed or waits in a queue so you can read it over and send it yourself. How complete the voucher looks does depend on the supplier behind the booking. Most hotel suppliers return a proper voucher reference along with the terms the hotel needs to see, and some provide their own voucher document that can simply be passed on to the guest. For flights, the airline reference and ticket number only appear once ticketing is finished, so if a booking is still unticketed the document will show only what is known at that moment and a fresh one should be sent afterwards. Two other things are worth knowing. Sending from your own domain name takes a small one time setup with whoever looks after your domain, and it makes a real difference to whether the message lands in the inbox rather than the junk folder. Also, for bookings you arranged yourself and entered by hand, the software can only print what you typed in, so the document is as good as the detail you enter. Before you turn automatic sending on, make a test booking in your own name, read the document that arrives as if you were the customer, and check that your contact details and cancellation terms are the ones you want shown.

Question 6

Can I tell from the hotel search results whether breakfast is included in the room price?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. Hotel suppliers usually send a board basis along with each room rate, and that detail comes through the API and shows next to the room on your portal. So a travel agent looking at the results would normally see wording such as room only, bed and breakfast, half board, full board or all inclusive, and can compare two rates for the same hotel side by side before deciding which one to sell. The useful part is that the board basis sits with the rate rather than with the hotel, because the same property often has a cheaper room only rate and a slightly dearer rate with breakfast. When both come back from the supplier, your customer can see the difference and choose, and the board basis also carries through onto the confirmation and the voucher you send them. Being honest about the limits, this depends on the supplier. Some send a clean, consistent board field that is easy to display. Others put the meal information inside the free text description of the rate, where the wording varies and is sometimes only in the local language. A few rates say breakfast is payable at the hotel, and local taxes or resort charges can still be collected at check in. Where a supplier sends nothing, your portal can only show what it received, so it may simply show no board information at all. It is worth running a few test searches in the destinations you sell most, seeing how the board basis appears for your main suppliers, and reading the full rate conditions before you confirm anything where a meal matters to the customer.

Question 7

If the flight price changes between my customer searching and paying, will the API warn me before the booking goes through?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in almost all cases you will be told before the ticket is issued. Airline fares are live and are only held for a short moment, so before a booking is confirmed the API runs a check back with the airline to confirm the fare is still available. If the fare has moved, that check comes back with the new amount rather than quietly issuing at a different price. What happens after that depends on how your portal is set up. The usual approach is to show the customer the new amount and ask them to accept it before any payment is taken. Some agencies prefer to let very small differences go through automatically and only stop the booking when the change is larger, so that customers are not interrupted over a few pennies. Either way it is a setting you choose, not something fixed. Be aware that airlines do not all behave the same. Low cost carriers and direct airline connections can move quickly, and sometimes the result is not a higher fare but the seat being gone altogether, in which case the customer has to pick another flight. If you have already collected money before this check runs, you may need to refund or request the difference, and how smoothly that works depends on your payment setup and your plan. It is worth asking us which re-price behaviour your setup currently uses and what tolerance, if any, is applied, and making sure your booking page carries a short line telling customers the fare is confirmed with the airline at the final step.

Question 8

Can I find an old booking in the software if my customer only remembers their name and roughly when they travelled?

Accepted Answer

Yes, that is usually enough to find it. Travel agency software keeps a record of every booking made through it, and those records can be searched on the details you are most likely to have to hand, such as the passenger name, the travel dates, the destination, the staff member who made the booking, or the booking reference if the customer still has their paperwork. If you are not sure how the name was spelled, searching on the first few letters will normally bring up a short list to choose from, along with any other trips the same person has booked with you. When the customer is vague about dates, the better approach is to search a range of dates rather than one exact day, then narrow the list down by destination or by whether the booking was completed or cancelled. Bookings you entered by hand, for things you arranged outside the system, are stored in the same place and come up in the same search, so you do not have to look in two places. There are honest limits worth knowing. The software can only find what it holds, so trips arranged before you started using it will only appear if those older records were brought across when you set up. On top of that, a supplier may no longer hold live details for a reservation that travelled a long time ago, so you might see your own record of it while still needing to contact the supplier directly for anything current, and how far back that reaches varies by supplier. The search filters available to you can also depend on your plan. The next time a customer calls with only a name, try a partial name search across a wide date range, and have a look at which filters your own setup gives you so you know what you can narrow by.

Question 9

Can I send a special request like a late check in or a double bed to the hotel when I book through your API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, hotel bookings made through our hotel booking API can usually carry a special request, and there is a field for you to type things like a late arrival, a double bed instead of twins, a quiet room away from the lift, or a note that the stay is a honeymoon. The request travels with the reservation to the supplier and on to the property, so the hotel normally sees it on their copy of the booking. The important thing to understand is that a special request is a request and not a guarantee. Hotels treat these as subject to availability on the day, and the front desk decides when they allocate rooms. So it is worth telling your customer the same thing, that you have asked and the hotel has it on file, but nobody can promise a high floor or adjoining rooms until they arrive. If something is genuinely essential, such as a wheelchair accessible room or a ground floor room for someone who cannot manage stairs, it is safer to book a room type that is actually sold as accessible rather than rely on a free text note. What you can send also depends on the supplier behind the rate. Some accept free text of a reasonable length, some only accept a short list of standard options like non smoking or early check in, and a few pass nothing through at all on their cheapest rates. Bed type is often part of the room choice rather than a request, so read the room name in the search results first. Very long notes and text in other alphabets can get trimmed along the way. Before you promise anything to a customer, make a test booking with a request on it, see how it shows on the confirmation and voucher, and ask us which of your connected suppliers support free text so you know where to set expectations.

Question 10

Will my flight booking API show budget airlines as well as the big full service carriers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases budget airlines can appear in your search results alongside the full service carriers, but it depends on which suppliers are enabled for your account, the plan you are on, and the routes your customers are searching. No single connection carries every airline in the world, so the honest answer is that coverage is good in most markets and thinner in a few. It also helps to know that low cost content usually reaches you through a different type of connection than traditional airline content, so it can behave differently. Those fares often have to be paid for at the time of booking, with no option to hold the seat. Things your customers may expect to be included, such as checked bags, seat selection and a meal, are usually sold as separate add ons, and whether you can add them at the time of booking depends on what the airline makes available. After the booking is made, you will normally receive the airline reference, though for some low cost carriers there is no traditional ticket number in the way there is with a full service airline. Changes and cancellations tend to follow the airline's own rules, and many of these fares are not refundable at all, so it is worth reading what comes back in the fare conditions before you confirm anything for a customer. Before you go live, ask us which airlines are currently available for the countries you sell most, then run a few test searches on your busiest routes and compare what you see against what you would normally quote.