Question 1

Can I see who changed a booking and what they changed in my travel agency software?

Accepted Answer

Yes, travel agency software can keep a history of changes made to a booking, so you can check which staff member took an action and when it happened. This can help if a traveller questions a name correction, cancellation request, payment update or other change, because your team has a clearer record to review. The amount of detail available depends on the feature, your plan and how the booking was handled. Some actions may show the exact change, while others may only show that the booking was updated. Changes made directly with a supplier, outside the portal or through another system may not appear unless someone records them manually. The history is useful for checking what happened, but it may not include every conversation or decision behind the action. Access to this information may also depend on staff permissions. A manager may be able to view the full history, while another staff member may only see the current booking details. This can support better control without giving everyone access to information they do not need. Check whether your chosen plan includes booking history, which actions it records and who in your team can view it before you rely on it for daily work.

Question 2

Can I add my customer's frequent flyer number and passport details to a flight booking on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. The passenger screen on a flight booking normally has room for more than the name, so you can enter a date of birth, a passport number with the country that issued it and its expiry date, and a frequent flyer or loyalty number for the airline being flown. Those details go to the airline with the booking and sit on the airline record itself, not just in your own notes. What the airline does with them is not the same everywhere. Some airlines want passport details before they will issue the ticket, some are happy to collect them at check in, and many only ask for them on international journeys. Frequent flyer numbers are usually accepted at the time of booking, but whether the miles actually land in the account is between your customer and the airline, so it is fairer to tell them to check their account after they fly than to promise anything. Budget airlines and some fare sources are stricter or simply accept fewer fields, and a number that is mistyped may be quietly ignored rather than rejected with an error you can see. If you find a field you need is missing for a particular airline, that is usually a limit of what that supplier accepts rather than something on your side. The sensible next step is to make one test booking with a passport and a loyalty number filled in, then look at the airline reference to confirm the details came through, and ask whoever supplies your fares which fields each of your suppliers passes on.

Question 3

If a flight my customer has already booked gets cancelled, will I be told or do I only find out when they call me?

Accepted Answer

Usually you will be told, but it depends on how the ticket was booked. When a flight is booked through a system that keeps a live link with the airline, the airline sends a message whenever a flight is cancelled or the timing moves, and that message can be shown against the booking in your portal so your staff see it before the customer rings. For most tickets sold that way, the alert reaches you first. The gap is with airlines and suppliers that do not pass those messages back in a dependable way. Some low cost carriers tell the passenger by email and nobody else, and some suppliers hand the change on slowly, or only when you ask. If the contact address held on the booking is the customer's own, they may well hear before you do. So treat the alert in your portal as a real help, not a promise that nothing will ever slip past you. What happens next is still a decision for your team. A cancellation or a big change in timing often gives the passenger the right to a free change or a refund, but those rules belong to the airline and to the fare that was bought, and they are not the same everywhere. Your portal can show you the booking and the new details so you can reach the customer quickly, but somebody has to talk to the airline or the supplier to rebook the seat or claim the money back. Ask which of your flight suppliers send cancellations and timing changes back into the booking, and decide who in your team checks those alerts each morning, so a change is caught well before your customer is standing at the airport.

Question 4

If someone books on my website with a stolen card, am I the one who loses the money?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the money comes back out of your account, not the airline's or the hotel's. When a card is charged on your website you are the merchant on that payment, so if the real cardholder tells their bank they never made the booking, the bank takes the money back from you. This is called a chargeback and it can arrive weeks after the travel has already been taken. The supplier has still issued the ticket or held the room, so they will expect to be paid either way. The better news is that many of these bookings can be stopped before they cost you anything. Your portal can hold a booking for a manual check instead of ticketing it straight away, which gives you time to call the customer or ask for proof of the card. Travel that starts almost immediately, a card issued in a very different country to the traveller, and repeat attempts from the same person in one day are worth looking at first. How much protection you have on the payment itself depends on your payment provider more than on the website. If your provider supports the extra step where the cardholder confirms the payment with their own bank, and it is switched on for every transaction rather than only some, the liability for a disputed booking usually moves away from you. Not every provider works this way, so please confirm it with them rather than assuming. Ask your payment provider whether that cardholder verification step is turned on for all bookings, then tell us which bookings you want held for a manual check before they go to the supplier.

Question 5

Will my customer see whether a hotel room can be cancelled for free, and by what date, before they pay?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The cancellation terms travel with the room rate itself, so every room in your search results carries its own policy, either free cancellation up to a certain date and time or non refundable from the moment it is booked. Your portal can show that on the room card, and again on the checkout page, so the customer reads and accepts it before paying rather than finding out afterwards. How much detail appears depends on the supplier. Most send a clear deadline and the charge that applies once it passes. Some send only a short line of text in their own wording, and a few give the deadline in the hotel's local time rather than your customer's, which can confuse someone booking from another country. Your portal can only display what the supplier sends, so it is worth looking at a few sample rooms from each supplier you connect and seeing how readable the wording really is. One thing that catches agents out is that these deadlines move. The free cancellation date is usually counted back from the check in date, so a room that is refundable today can quietly become non refundable a few weeks later without anyone changing anything. The safest habit is to save the policy against the booking at the moment it is made and print it on the voucher, so you and your customer both have the terms that applied on the day. Before you go live, run a test search and compare a refundable room with a non refundable one, then follow the wording all the way through to the confirmation email and the voucher to be sure nothing is lost along the way.

Question 6

Can I sell travel insurance on my website along with the flight or hotel booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can offer travel insurance next to a flight or hotel booking, but it depends on having an insurance provider connected to your portal. The usual way it works is that the cover is offered as an extra step in the booking, after your customer has picked their flight or their room and before they pay. They see the options for their trip, choose the one they want, and it is added to the same payment. The policy then comes back from the insurer and goes out to them with the rest of their travel documents, under your own branding. What you can actually offer depends on the insurer you work with and on what their system allows. Some insurers give a live connection, so the cover and the price are worked out from the real trip dates, the destination and the travellers. Others only allow a simple link across to their own page, or a fixed set of products, which means less of it is automatic and your team may have to issue the policy by hand. It also depends on the rules where you are based, because selling insurance usually needs a licence, or an arrangement with a broker who already holds one. If you want this on your portal, the first thing to check is whether your insurance partner offers an agent connection and whether you are cleared to sell their cover in your country. Once you know that, tell us what they can provide and we can look at how it fits into your booking flow.

Question 7

Can my customers pay a deposit now and the rest closer to travel, or do they have to pay the full amount when they book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually take a deposit now and collect the balance later, but whether it is safe to do so depends on what is being booked. Hotels with free cancellation are the easiest, because the supplier does not need the money until close to the stay date, so you can hold the room and collect the rest before that deadline. Flights are different. Once a ticket is issued the airline wants the whole fare, so offering a deposit on a flight usually means you are covering the difference yourself until your customer pays you. On the website side this is a setting. You can set the deposit as a share of the booking, pick which products it applies to, and set when the balance falls due. The customer pays the first part by card at the time of booking, and their confirmation shows what is still owed and by when. The balance can be collected with a secure payment link, or by charging the same card again if your payment provider and your local rules allow a card to be stored. The part to watch is the gap between your balance date and the supplier's own deadline. If the customer does not pay in time, someone has to cancel or pay, and that someone is you. Most agencies handle this with automatic reminders and by cancelling a few days before the supplier's free cancellation date. Whether you give the deposit back at that point is your own policy, so put it in your terms. Check with your payment provider whether it supports payment links and repeat charges, then decide which products you are happy to sell on a deposit and set your balance date safely ahead of your supplier's.

Question 8

Can I control what each of my staff can see on the portal, like hiding my cost prices and my profit from them?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can decide what each member of your staff can see and do on the portal, including keeping your supplier cost and your profit hidden from them. Most travel agency software works on roles. You create a login for each person and put them into a role, and that role decides which parts of the system open up for them. A booking agent might be able to search, hold and issue, while only you and your accounts person can see the supplier cost, the margin on each booking, the markup rules and the reports that show total profit. The same idea covers who is allowed to cancel a booking, who can process a refund and who can change the settings on the website, because those are the actions that hurt the most if the wrong person does them by mistake. How finely you can slice it does depend on the system and on the plan you are on. Some setups give you a few ready made roles, such as agent, accounts, manager and owner, and you simply pick one for each person. Others let you tick individual permissions one by one, and even tie a user to a single branch or a single group of sub agents. It is worth being honest with yourself about the size of your team, because a system that only offers two or three fixed roles will feel tight once you have several people working different jobs. Before you commit, ask to see the user and role screen on a live demo, create a test staff login for yourself, then sign in as that person and check that the cost price and the profit reports really are out of sight.

Question 9

Can my website show prices in my customer's own currency, or does everything have to be in one currency?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label portal can normally show prices in more than one currency, so a customer in another country sees a figure they understand instead of doing the sums themselves. The way it usually works is that the airline or hotel supplier sends the price in its own currency, and your portal converts it into the currency the visitor has chosen using an exchange rate. That rate can come from a live feed or it can be one you set and update yourself, and most systems let you add a small cushion on top so a movement in the market does not eat into your margin. You can also decide which currencies to offer rather than showing every one, which keeps the site simple for the customers you actually sell to. What you need to be honest with yourself about is that showing a currency and getting paid in it are two different things. The currencies you can actually charge in depend on your payment gateway and on the account you hold with it, and some suppliers will only settle with you in their own currency no matter what the customer saw. The ticket or the hotel voucher may still be issued in the supplier currency, and the customer's own bank may apply its own conversion on the statement. Refunds normally go back in the currency the card was charged in, so the amount returned can differ slightly from what was paid. Before you switch this on, check with your payment provider which currencies it can collect and settle for you, and decide where your exchange rate will come from and how often it should refresh.

Question 10

If an airline adds a new route or changes its flight times, does my website pick that up on its own or do I have to update it myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it picks that up on its own. The flight results on your portal are not a stored list that somebody has to keep current. Each time a customer searches, the request goes out to the airline or the supplier at that moment and comes back with the routes, times and seats being sold right then. So when an airline opens a new route or moves a departure time, it shows in your search results without you doing anything, and there is nothing for you or your staff to load in. Where it works differently is a booking that has already been made. If an airline changes the time of a flight your customer is already holding a ticket for, that does not come through a search, it arrives separately as a schedule change notice from the airline. Whether that notice reaches you on its own, as an alert inside your portal or as an email, or whether someone on your side has to go and look for it, depends on the supplier the booking was made through. Some pass these on properly, some pass them on slowly, and some do not pass them on at all. There is one more limit worth knowing, because it is easy to mix up. A whole new airline appearing is not the same thing as a new route on an airline you already sell. If the airline is one your current supplier does not carry, it will not simply turn up, and adding it usually means another connection has to be switched on, which depends on your plan and on what that supplier offers. The thing to check next is how schedule changes on live bookings actually reach you, since that is the part that catches agents out rather than the search side. Ask your supplier where those notices land and make sure someone on your team is watching that place every day.