Question 1

If a hotel is overbooked and turns my customer away at check in, who finds them another hotel?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your customer can be moved to another hotel, but the supplier who holds that booking is the one who arranges it, not your booking portal on its own. When a hotel cannot honour a room it has sold, it tells the supplier, and the supplier looks for a similar or better property nearby and confirms the change. Your job in that moment is to reach the supplier quickly with the booking reference and your customer's phone number, so the hotel and the supplier are talking to the same person about the same room. What you can claim back afterwards, such as the taxi to the new hotel or the difference in the room rate, depends entirely on that supplier's terms and on the type of rate the room was booked on. Rooms bought through a wholesaler often have different rules from rooms bought on a direct contract, and a very cheap non refundable rate usually gives you less room to argue. No portal can force a hotel to hand over a room it does not have, so this part is always a supplier matter rather than a software one. It helps to keep the booking record in your system honest while all this is happening. Save the new hotel name and the new confirmation against the same booking, and write a short note about what went wrong, so any of your staff can pick up the call later without asking the customer to explain it again. Before your busy season, ask each of your hotel suppliers for their emergency contact and their written policy on relocation, and keep both somewhere your team can find them in a hurry.

Question 2

When my customer pays for a booking on my website, does the money come into my own account first?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups the money lands in your own account first. When you take card payments through your own payment gateway on your portal, the customer is paying you, and you then pay the supplier for that booking out of the balance or the credit you hold with them. Your customer sees your own agency name against the payment, not the name of a company they have never heard of. There are cases where it works the other way round. Some suppliers, and some airlines in particular, insist on collecting the payment themselves at the time of booking. With a deposit arrangement you top the balance up with the supplier in advance and every booking draws down from it, so the money moves in the opposite order. Which of these applies depends on the supplier, on the product and on the terms you agreed with them, so it is worth checking supplier by supplier rather than assuming they all behave the same way. The timing matters as much as the direction. Card money normally takes some working days to settle from your gateway into your bank account, while the supplier often needs paying at the moment the booking is made, so you need enough working balance to cover that gap. Refunds usually travel back along the same path they came, which means the supplier refund has to reach you before you can hand it back to your customer. Before you go live, ask each supplier how and when they want to be paid, and ask your payment provider how long settlement takes, so you know how much working money to keep aside.

Question 3

Can my customers book just an airport transfer or a day tour on my website, or do they have to book a flight or a hotel first?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases they can. Transfers and sightseeing can sit on your website as products in their own right, so a customer is able to book an airport pickup or a day tour on its own without buying a flight or a room from you at the same time. A portal will usually carry airport transfers, private cars, day tours and activities, each with its own search, its own availability and its own voucher. Your customer chooses a pickup point and a time for a transfer, or a date and the number of travellers for a tour, and pays the same way they would for anything else on your site. You can also show these at the end of a flight or hotel booking, so the option appears while the customer is already buying from you. What you can actually sell depends on which suppliers are connected to your portal. Transfers and tours come from different suppliers to the ones that give you flight and hotel content, so each one has to be connected and switched on before anything shows in a search. Coverage is uneven as well. A supplier can be strong in one country and thin in another, and smaller towns usually have far less to choose from than the main tourist cities. If you have your own drivers or your own tours arranged locally, most systems let you load them yourself so they sit alongside the supplier ones, though whether that is included is worth confirming for your plan. A good next step is to write down the destinations you sell most often and the kind of extras your customers usually ask for, then check the live coverage for those places before you advertise them on your site.

Question 4

Will my customer see the extra charges a hotel collects at check in, like city tax or a resort fee, before they pay on my website?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your customer will see those charges before they pay, but it depends on what the supplier sends through for that hotel. Hotel rates arrive from your suppliers as a room price plus, separately, a note of anything the property collects directly at check in. That can be a city or tourist tax, a resort or facility fee, or a charge for parking or cleaning. When the supplier sends that information in a form the portal can read, it is shown under the room price on the search and booking pages, worded as payable at the hotel rather than added to the amount your customer pays you. It is also carried onto the confirmation voucher, so the guest has it in writing when they arrive. Where this gets less tidy is that suppliers are not consistent with each other. Some send these charges as plain text buried in the room description instead of as proper data, and in that case the portal can only display the text as it came through. Local taxes also change from time to time, and some are worked out per person per night, so what is quoted at the time of booking is the supplier's best statement rather than a promise from the hotel. If you connect more than one supplier, you may well find the same hotel describing its extras differently on each connection. The useful thing to do next is to run a few test searches on the cities you sell most often and read what actually appears under the price for those hotels. If a supplier you rely on is sending nothing at all, raise it with them, and in the meantime you can add your own standing wording to the voucher so your customers are never caught out at the desk.

Question 5

Do I need my own deal with the airlines to sell flights on my portal, or do the fares come with the booking system?

Accepted Answer

In most cases no, you do not need your own agreement with each airline before you can start selling flights on your portal. Flight content usually reaches a booking system through a supplier such as a consolidator, an aggregator or a global distribution system, and that supplier already holds the relationships and the ticketing authority with the airlines. Your portal connects to them, and their fares appear in your own search results under your own branding. What you do need is an account with at least one such supplier in your market. That means signing an agreement with them, passing the checks they ask for, and agreeing how your bookings will be funded, usually a prepaid balance or a credit line they approve. They then issue the credentials your portal uses to search and to book. Until those credentials exist there is nothing for the portal to show, so it is worth starting that process early rather than leaving it to the end. If you already hold your own fares with an airline, or you get special rates through a group or a consortium, those can often be shown next to the ordinary ones. Whether it works depends on the airline and on the supplier, because some fares are released only through one channel, and a direct connection to an airline normally needs that airline to approve you first. So not every fare you have on paper can always be sold online. Before you commit, ask the supplier you have in mind which airlines they cover on the routes your customers really fly, whether budget carriers are included, and who issues the ticket. Those answers will show you how much airline paperwork is still yours to do.

Question 6

If my portal stops working or a booking will not go through, can I get help straight away or do I have to wait?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can get help, and you do not have to wait for a working day to report a problem. Every portal comes with a support channel, and urgent things like a booking that will not complete or a site that will not load are handled differently from small requests such as a wording change. How quickly someone picks it up depends on the plan you are on, so it is worth knowing what yours includes before the day you need it. It also helps to know that not every problem sits with your website. A portal works on top of airline and hotel supplier systems, and when one of those goes quiet or slows down, searches can fail or come back empty even though your site is perfectly healthy. In that case we can see what is happening and chase the supplier, but the fix is in their hands and we cannot promise a time. We will tell you plainly when that is the case rather than leave you guessing. When you report something, the most useful thing to send is what you were doing, what you saw on the screen, and the reference number if a booking was involved. A screenshot saves a lot of time. With that we can usually trace the exact search or booking instead of asking you to go through it all again. Check what support your plan includes and how to reach us outside office hours, then save that somewhere your staff can find it, so nobody is hunting for it on a busy evening.

Question 7

Will my website show proper photos and descriptions for each hotel, or just the name and the price?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your site will show photos, a written description, the facility list and the room details for each hotel, not only the name and the price. That content comes across from the hotel supplier together with the availability, and your portal displays it in the search results and on the hotel page, so your customer can see what they are booking before they pay. How good that content is does depend on the supplier. Some send a large set of images, a full description, the facilities, the check in and check out times and a clear name for every room type. Others send a short description and only one or two pictures, and for smaller or independent properties some send very little. That is why you may see one hotel with a full gallery and the hotel next to it with a single image. It is the data we receive, not something your website is holding back. You are not stuck with it. If you have your own pictures or your own wording for the hotels you sell often, those can be loaded and shown in place of what the supplier sent, and where a hotel arrives with no image at all a neutral one is used so the listing still looks tidy. When you are connected to more than one supplier, the fuller description of the two can be preferred for the same property. Showing descriptions in another language depends on whether the supplier sends them that way. The useful thing to do next is to pick a few hotels you sell regularly, open them on your portal, and tell your support contact which ones look thin so the content for those can be checked against what the supplier is actually sending.

Question 8

Can my customers search for a trip with several stops in one search, or does it only work for one way and return flights?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your portal can search a trip with several stops in one go, as long as the flight supplier behind it supports that kind of search. This is usually called a multi city search, and it lets your customer set a different city and a different date for each leg of the journey, instead of only choosing a going date and a coming back date. How well it works depends on which supplier you are connected to. A full airline reservation system will normally handle a journey with several legs and price it as one fare, which is often cheaper for the customer and easier to change later than separate tickets. Some budget airline connections do not offer this at all, so the portal has to put the journey together as separate one way tickets. That still gets your customer where they are going, but each leg then carries its own rules for changes, refunds and baggage, and your customer needs to be told that clearly. There are practical limits worth knowing before you promise it. A search with many legs takes longer to come back than a simple return search, because the supplier has to price every combination. Some suppliers also cap how many legs they will accept in one request, and an unusual routing can come back empty even when the flights do exist. If this kind of trip is common for your customers, ask which of your connected flight suppliers allow multi city searching and how many legs each one accepts, then try a real routing your customers often ask for on your own portal before you rely on it.

Question 9

Can I add bookings I arranged offline, over the phone or by email, into the same system as my website bookings?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most travel agency software you can enter a booking you arranged yourself and keep it next to the ones that came through your website. It is usually called an offline or manual booking. You fill in the details by hand, the passenger name, the travel dates, the supplier, what you paid and what you are charging, and once it is saved it behaves like any other booking, so it shows in your booking list, in your reports and on that customer's file. The thing to be clear about is that a manual booking is only a record. The system is not connected to the airline or the hotel for it, so it cannot issue the ticket, send a live voucher or cancel anything on your behalf. If the supplier changes the timing or your customer wants to cancel, you go back to the supplier the way you always did, then update the record yourself so your figures stay right. How much you can do here depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up. Some setups let you add every kind of product by hand, flights, hotels, transfers and packages, while others allow only a few, and many let you decide which staff members are allowed to create or edit a manual booking. The thing worth checking is whether manual bookings feed into your sales reports and your accounting the same way online bookings do, because that decides whether you end up with one true picture of the business or two separate ones.

Question 10

Can I run two different branded websites from the same booking system, or do I need a separate portal for each?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can run more than one website from the same booking system, although how many brands you are allowed and how far apart they can look will depend on the plan you are on. The usual arrangement is one back office, where your bookings, your supplier connections and your markup live, with more than one front end sitting on top of it. Each front end can have its own domain name, its own logo and colours and its own wording, so a customer visiting one of them has no reason to think it is linked to the other. Agencies often do this when they sell to holidaymakers under one name and to corporate clients under another, or when they want a separate site aimed at one city or country. What normally stays shared is the engine underneath. Your supplier connections, your staff logins and your reporting usually cover all the brands together, which is convenient, but it does mean a change you make to a supplier will affect every site at once. If you need genuinely separate markup rules, separate payment accounts or separate reporting for each brand, ask about that on its own, because it is not always included as standard and sometimes depends on what the supplier will allow. Before you commit to a second brand, decide whether you want the bookings from both sites sitting together in one place or kept apart, and then check what your plan allows on domains, branding and markup.