Question 1

Can I add bookings I arranged myself, like a local bus or a hotel I called directly, so everything sits in one place?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can record a booking you arranged yourself and keep it next to the ones made through the system, so a customer's whole trip sits in one file. This is usually called a manual or offline booking, and you type in the details you already have, such as the supplier name, the dates, the service, what you paid and what you are charging. Once it is saved it behaves like any other booking in the file, so it appears in the customer's history and can be included in the itinerary you send them. The honest limit is that a manual booking only knows what you tell it. There is no live connection to that bus company or that hotel, so the system cannot confirm the reservation, cannot warn you if the supplier changes something, and cannot show a cancellation deadline unless you enter it yourself. If the supplier moves a time or the hotel changes a room type, you have to update the record by hand. Anything you type wrongly will stay wrong until someone corrects it. Whether these manual bookings also flow into your reports, your customer statements and your outstanding balance list depends on how your account is configured and on the plan you are on. In many cases they do, which is what makes the feature worth using, but it is worth confirming rather than assuming, because some setups treat offline items as notes only. The next thing to check is whether a manual booking on your account carries through to your month end reporting and your money owed figures, and if it does, agree with your staff on a simple rule for what gets recorded so your records stay reliable.

Question 2

Can I keep my existing website and just add the booking part to it, or do I have to replace the whole site?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can keep the website you already have and simply add the booking side to it. Plenty of agencies have spent years building up their site, their content and their search rankings, and there is no reason to throw that away. The usual approach is that your current site stays exactly as it is for your home page, your about page and your contact details, and the booking engine lives on its own page or section that you link to from your menu with a button such as Book Now or Search Flights. There are generally two ways this is set up. The booking screens can sit on a page within your existing site so visitors never feel they have left it, or they can open on a web address that belongs to you and is styled to match your main site, using your logo, your colours and your fonts. Which one suits you best depends a lot on how your current website was built and what platform it runs on, so it is worth telling us that early rather than assuming. Be aware of a few honest limits. Older or very custom sites sometimes make the in page option awkward, and whoever looks after your website may need to add the link or the page for you, which is usually a small job rather than a rebuild. The search and results screens also follow their own layout, so they will carry your branding but will not be a pixel for pixel copy of your existing design. What is possible can also vary by plan. Before you decide, check who currently manages your website and whether you can get a page added or edited, then send us your site address so we can suggest the neatest way to join the two together.

Question 3

Do I need to hire a developer to connect your flight booking API to my website?

Accepted Answer

Yes, for a direct API connection you will need someone with web development experience, either on your own staff or hired for the project. A flight booking API is a way for one piece of software to talk to another, so there is no screen to log into and nothing to click. Someone has to write the code that sends the search, reads the results that come back, lays them out on your pages in a way your customers understand, and then passes the passenger and payment details through to make the booking. That is ordinary development work and it cannot be done from inside a browser by someone without that background. If you do not have a developer and do not want to go looking for one, the usual route is a ready made white label portal or an agent booking panel instead. Those arrive with the search, results, booking and payment screens already built, so you can start selling under your own name and branding without writing anything yourself. You give up some control over layout and workflow compared with a custom build, but you avoid the development time and cost. How much work an API build takes depends on what you are trying to achieve. Adding a simple search and book flow to an existing site is a smaller job than building a full booking engine with customer accounts, quotes and reports, and some airline content needs extra handling around payment and ticketing rules, which adds to the work. We can hand your developer the documentation and a test setup to work against before anything goes live, but we cannot promise how long the work on your side will take. Before you decide, write down plainly what you want a customer to be able to do on your site, then share that with us so we can tell you whether the white label option already covers it or whether an API build is genuinely the better fit.

Question 4

Can I get hotel photos and descriptions through your hotel booking API so my pages don't look empty?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the hotel photos, descriptions, facility lists and star ratings come through the API along with the rates, so you do not have to build those pages by hand. This is usually called static content, and it covers things like the address, the check in and check out times, what is in the room and what the property offers on site. It normally works a little differently from a live search. Rather than sending all that text and all those images back every time someone looks for a room, the content is pulled in separately and kept ready so your pages load quickly. The rates and availability stay live, and the pictures and descriptions sit behind them. We refresh that content on a regular cycle so new properties and updated details come through. The honest limit is that the quality depends entirely on the supplier and on the hotel itself. Large chains and well known city hotels tend to have plenty of good images and a full write up. Small independent properties and guest houses can come through with one or two pictures and a short line of text. Images are usually hosted by the supplier, so they can change or stop working, and some suppliers set rules about how long you may hold their content or whether you may edit it. Where the same hotel reaches you from more than one supplier, the photos and wording may not match. Before you launch, ask us to show you the content for a handful of properties in the destinations you sell most, and plan to write your own descriptions for your best sellers so those pages stand out.

Question 5

Can I add my own service fee to the flight prices that come through your API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can normally add your own service fee or markup to the flight prices that come back through a flight booking API, and this is usually one of the first things set up when a portal goes live. The idea is that the API gives you the fare it received from the supplier, your markup rule is applied on top, and your portal or your staff screen shows only the selling price to the customer. How flexible this is depends on your plan and on how you want to work. Rules can often be set as a flat amount per passenger, per ticket or as a percentage, and many agencies like to vary them by airline, by route, by cabin or by which agent login made the booking, so corporate customers and walk in customers can be treated differently. If you prefer, you can take the raw fare from the API and apply your own calculation in your own system instead, which gives you complete control but means you look after the logic yourself. The honest limits are worth knowing before you plan your pricing. Some airlines and some fare types restrict what can be added into the ticketed fare, so your fee may have to sit as a separate service charge rather than inside the airline amount. That also means the figure printed on the airline ticket will not always match what your customer paid you, and a curious customer may notice. Refund and void rules usually apply to the airline part only, so you decide your own policy on whether your fee is refundable. Before you go live, check which markup options your plan supports and agree how your service fee will appear on the invoice and itinerary your customer receives.

Question 6

Can I change the colours and logo on my white label travel portal so it looks like my own agency?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can put your own branding on a white label travel portal, and most agencies do this before they go live. The things you normally control are your logo, your colour scheme, the fonts, the banner images on the home page and the wording you use to describe your business. These are set from an admin area, so you can change them yourself later without asking anyone, which helps if you rebrand or want a seasonal look for a busy season. What is usually fixed is the shape of the booking journey. The search box, the results page, the way room and fare options are listed and the payment steps follow a tested layout, because they have to show supplier information correctly and meet card payment rules. You can restyle how all of that looks, but moving the steps around or redesigning the results page from scratch is a bigger piece of work that depends on your plan and would need to be looked at separately. You can usually add your own content around the booking engine too, such as an about page, contact details, destination pages and your own policies, so the portal reads like your own website rather than a booking tool bolted on the side. Some items do have to stay as the supplier provides them, for example airline and hotel names, fare conditions and cancellation wording, since changing those could mislead your customer. A good next step is to get your logo in a good quality file along with your colour codes, then ask us to walk you through the branding settings on a demo portal so you can see exactly which parts you can change yourself and which would need extra design work.

Question 7

If my internet goes down in the office, can I still get to my bookings in the travel agency software?

Accepted Answer

No, not while the connection is down, because the software runs online and your browser needs to reach it. The good news is that nothing is lost. Your bookings, customer records and documents sit on the hosted platform rather than on your office computer, so when the connection comes back everything is exactly where you left it, including any booking you were part way through saving. The practical workaround is that the software is not tied to one machine or one network. If your office line fails, you can sign in from a phone or tablet on mobile data, or from a laptop at home, and carry on with the same login. Many agents keep this as their fallback rather than relying on anything stored locally. It also means an outage at your end does not stop your white label portal, so customers can keep searching and booking while you are offline, and those bookings will be waiting for you. What an outage can affect is anything that was mid flight at the moment the connection dropped. If you had clicked to confirm a booking and the screen never came back, treat that booking as uncertain rather than failed. Once you are back online, check the booking list before trying again, so you do not create a duplicate. Whether the supplier completed it depends on how far the request got, so the record in the software is the thing to trust. It is worth agreeing with your team now which device and connection you will all switch to if the office line goes down, and making sure everyone knows to check existing bookings before rebooking anything.

Question 8

Do I have to give the guest's passport details when I book a hotel through your API?

Accepted Answer

No, in most cases you do not need passport details to make a hotel booking through our API. The usual requirement is the lead guest name, and often the names of the other adults sharing the room, along with a contact for the booking itself. That is enough for the large majority of rates you will sell day to day. There are exceptions, and they come from the supplier or the hotel rather than from us. Some rates are sold only to residents of a particular country, or only to people who are not residents, so the supplier asks for guest nationality before it will confirm. Others ask for the lead guest address, date of birth or a phone number, which is more common when the rate is paid at the hotel or has a local tax attached. When one of these is required, the API tells you at the point of booking, so you can collect it from your customer once instead of guessing in advance. It is also worth remembering that anything you do not collect at booking, the hotel can still ask for at check in. In many countries the front desk is legally obliged to see a passport or national identity card on arrival, no matter how the reservation was made. So even where the API does not request a document, it helps to remind your customer to carry theirs, and to make sure the guest name you enter matches that document exactly, since name mismatches are the most common cause of problems at the desk. A good next step is to run a test booking on the rates and destinations you sell most often and note which guest fields come back as required, so your booking form asks for the right details first time.

Question 9

If I spell my customer's name wrong on a flight ticket, can I fix it through the API or do I have to cancel and book again?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases a name can be corrected, but whether it is possible depends on the airline rather than on the booking tools. Most airlines allow a small spelling correction, such as a wrong letter or a first name and middle name in the wrong order. Others treat any change to the name as a different passenger altogether and will only accept a cancellation and a fresh booking. There is no single rule that covers every carrier, so the same mistake can be easy to fix on one airline and impossible on another. How quickly you spot the mistake matters a great deal. If you notice it very soon after ticketing, you are often still inside the short window in which the airline allows a ticket to be voided, and the cleanest answer is to void and rebook with the correct spelling. Once that window has passed the ticket has to be reissued instead, and the airline may charge for that or may simply refuse and leave you buying a new ticket. What you can do yourself through the API depends on what each supplier makes available. Some suppliers accept a name correction request directly, so you can send it from your own system and wait for the airline to respond. Others offer no such option, in which case our support team raises it with the supplier on your behalf. In both situations it is a request rather than an instant change, and the airline has the final word. Before you issue any ticket, check the spelling against the passport exactly as it appears there, and if a mistake has already gone through, report it the same day so you have the best chance of a simple fix.

Question 10

Can the software keep track of which customers still owe me money for their trips?

Accepted Answer

Yes, travel agency software normally keeps a running record of what each customer has paid and what is still outstanding on every booking, so you can see at a glance who is behind without digging through your bank statements. The way it usually works is that each booking holds a selling total, and any money you receive is recorded against that booking as a part payment or a deposit. The outstanding balance then updates on its own. If the customer pays by card on your portal, that payment is normally recorded automatically when it goes through. If they pay you in cash or by bank transfer, somebody on your team will need to enter it, because the software has no way of seeing your bank account by itself. You can then pull up a list of bookings with money still owing and work through it. There are honest limits here. The software tracks balances, but it is not a full accounting system, so your bookkeeping will still live wherever it lives now. Payment due dates depend on the supplier and the fare or rate rules behind each booking, so a deadline shown against a booking is only as reliable as what the supplier sent. Whether you get automatic reminders to the customer, and how much of the layout you can change, often depends on the plan you are on and how your portal is set up. Before you commit, write down the handful of things you actually need, such as part payments, a list of who owes what, and reminders, and ask to see each one working on a real booking during your demo.