Question 1

When my customer books a hotel, do they get the confirmation straight away or do we have to wait to hear back from the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Most of the time yes, the confirmation comes back within a few seconds, but not always, and which one you get depends on the hotel and on the supplier the room came from. Most of the rooms you see in a search are what the trade calls instantly confirmed. The supplier already holds live allotment for that property, so when your customer pays, the booking is sent, accepted and a supplier reference comes back while they are still sitting on the page, and the voucher can go out right then. A smaller number of rooms are sold on request, which means the supplier has to go and ask the hotel before anything can be held. In that case the booking sits in a pending state, and the answer can take anywhere from a few minutes to the next working day, sometimes longer over a weekend or a public holiday. What matters is that your portal makes the difference obvious before the money is taken, and that a pending booking shows up clearly in your booking list so nobody on your team assumes it is done. If the hotel comes back and declines, the booking is cancelled and the payment is released or refunded on your payment gateway's normal timing rather than instantly. Ask your supplier which of their properties are on request, because it varies a lot by region and by the type of property, and make sure your staff know to hold the voucher back until a pending booking has actually been confirmed.

Question 2

Can I give my sub agents a credit limit so they can book on my portal without paying upfront every time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this is normally possible, and it is one of the main reasons agencies put their sub agents on their own portal instead of taking bookings over the phone. Each sub agent gets a login and a wallet or ledger of their own. You set how much they are allowed to spend, and every booking they make is taken off that balance. When the balance runs out they cannot book again until they top up or until you raise the limit, so you are never exposed further than the amount you agreed to. You stay in control of the whole thing from your own admin. You can add money to a sub agent when they pay you, reduce or increase their limit as your relationship with them changes, and see a statement of what each one has booked and what they still owe. Some agencies give a generous limit to the sub agents they have worked with for years and keep newer ones on a prepaid balance until they have proved themselves, and you can mix the two freely. There are a couple of things to be honest about. The credit is yours, not the supplier's, so if a sub agent does not pay you the loss sits with you and the software can only enforce the limit you set. Whether this feature is switched on, and how much detail you get in the statements, can depend on your plan, so it is worth confirming before you sign sub agents up. If you plan to work this way, decide your starting limits and your top up process first, then ask for the sub agent module to be enabled and test it with one friendly agent before you open it to everyone.

Question 3

If a large group wants to travel together, can I book them all in one go on my website?

Accepted Answer

Usually not as one single booking. Most airlines set a small limit on how many passengers can sit on one ticket order, and a party bigger than that is treated as a group, which airlines handle through their own group desks rather than through the live search that feeds your portal. So the booking screen your customer sees is built for a normal family or a small party, not for a whole coach load. What your portal can do is split the party into several smaller bookings, one after the other. That works, but each booking is priced on its own at whatever is available at that moment, so the later ones can come out dearer than the first, and seats together on the plane are not guaranteed. For a handful of travellers that is rarely a problem. For a pilgrimage group or a company outing it is almost always better to go for a proper group fare. The common way round it is a group enquiry form on your site, where the customer gives you the dates, the route and how many people are travelling, and it reaches you as a lead instead of a booking. You then agree a fare with the airline or your consolidator and put that fare back on the portal for the group to pay against. Whether that form and the manual fare loading are available to you depends on your plan and on the suppliers you are connected to. Ask your supplier what the passenger limit is on each airline you have connected, and decide whether a group enquiry form belongs on your site so you stop losing those bigger trips.

Question 4

Can I stop certain hotels from showing on my website, like ones I have had trouble with before?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. Most portals let you keep a list of hotels you do not want to sell, and anything on that list is taken out of the search results before your customer ever sees it. This is usually something you manage yourself from your admin screens, so you do not have to ask anyone to make the change for you each time a property disappoints you. The way it works is that every hotel a supplier sends you carries its own code, and the block is saved against that code. That matters when you are connected to more than one hotel supplier, because the same property can arrive with a different code from each of them, so you may need to block it once for each supplier before it stops appearing altogether. Many portals also let you block a whole chain, or every property in a particular area, which saves time when you are steering clear of a group rather than one hotel. Be aware of what this does not do. It does not stop the supplier from offering the hotel, it simply filters it out on your side, so if you add a new supplier later your existing blocks will not automatically apply to what that new connection sends. How much of this you can control on your own, and whether chain level blocking is available, depends on your plan and on the detail each supplier gives in its data. After you add a hotel to the list, search your own website for that city and then for the hotel by name, and confirm it no longer comes back in either result.

Question 5

Can I send my customer a few flight or hotel options to choose from and let them pay for the one they like?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most travel portals you can put a few options into one quote and send it to your customer as a link, so they can look at them side by side and pay for the one they prefer. You search as normal, save the options you want to suggest, add a short note about each one, and the portal builds a page in your own branding that you can email or send on WhatsApp. What your customer sees when they open that link is the important part. A good quote checks the price again at the moment it is opened, because airline and hotel prices move on their own. That means the option may still be there at the same price, it may have gone up, or it may have sold out by then. It is far better for your customer to see that honestly on the page than to pay and have the booking fail afterwards. Whether the customer can pay straight from the quote depends on your plan and on your payment setup. If you have a payment gateway connected, the quote can carry a pay button and the booking is made for you once the money clears. If you do not, the quote still works as a tidy way to present the choices, and you collect the payment the way you do today. Ask your provider whether quotes are included in the plan you are on, how long a quote link stays open before it expires, and whether the price on it is refreshed live or simply frozen at the moment you sent it.

Question 6

Why do my hotel searches take so long to show results, and can anything be done to speed them up?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a slow hotel search can usually be improved, though some of the wait will always be there. When your customer searches, your website has to ask each hotel supplier for live rooms and live prices for those exact dates and that exact number of guests. Nothing is sitting ready in advance, because a price saved last week would be wrong by the time your customer came to pay. So the search is only ever as quick as the slowest supplier answering you. A few things make it worse. Searching a very large city brings back a great many properties, and they all have to arrive before the list can be sorted and shown. Long stays, several rooms in one search, and having more than one supplier connected at the same time all add to the wait. If you have asked for a lot of filtering to be done before anything appears on screen, your customer waits for that as well. What can be improved is how the wait feels. Hotel names, photos, descriptions and locations can be held on your own site so that only the prices need to be fetched live, and results can be shown as they come in rather than making the customer sit until the last supplier replies. A sensible time limit can also be set so one slow supplier does not hold up all the others. How much of this is open to you depends on your plan and on what your suppliers allow. If your searches feel slow, check whether it happens in every city or only the busiest ones, and whether it is one particular supplier that is holding things up, then pass those details to your support contact so it can be looked at properly.

Question 7

If I move to new travel agency software, can I bring my old bookings and my customer list across with me?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can bring your old bookings and your customer list across, but how cleanly it goes depends on what your current system will let you take out. The usual way is an export from your old software, normally a spreadsheet or a CSV file, holding your customers with their contact details, and your past bookings with the travel dates, the passenger names, the supplier reference and the amounts. That file is then mapped onto the matching fields in the new system and loaded in. Customer lists almost always come across without trouble, because the information is simple and every system stores it in much the same way. Bookings are harder, because each system keeps them a little differently, so some columns may not have an obvious home and a few things will need to be typed in by hand or left out. It helps to be clear about what an import can and cannot do. Old bookings brought in this way are records, useful for your reports, your accounts and your follow up with the customer. They are not live with the airline or the hotel any more, so you cannot cancel them, change them or reissue a ticket from the new portal the way you can with a booking made through it. Anything still due to travel is usually safer left where it was made until that trip is over. If your current provider will not give you an export at all, there may be very little to move, and that is worth finding out early. Ask your current provider in writing for a full export of your data, look at what the file actually contains, and only then agree what will be moved and what you will keep as it is.

Question 8

Can I change my customer's flight date after the ticket has been issued, or do they have to cancel and book again?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the date can be changed without cancelling, as long as the airline and the fare your customer bought allow it. This is usually called a reissue, and on your portal it sits against the existing booking rather than being a fresh search. You open the booking, choose the new date, and the system asks the airline what the new flight would cost. What comes back depends on the fare. Cheaper fares often carry a change fee, and if the new date is dearer your customer pays the difference on top. Some of the very cheapest fares cannot be changed at all, and in that case cancelling and rebooking really is the only route. Those rules come from the airline, so the portal shows you what the airline says rather than a rule we invent. Not every connection supports a change straight from the screen. Some airlines and consolidators still want the change handled by their own team, so your portal raises the request and the booking is updated once they confirm it. Low cost airlines vary the most here. Whether you can do it yourself in one go depends on which flight suppliers you are connected to and what your plan covers. Before you promise a customer anything, make a test booking on your portal and look at the change option on it, then ask each of your flight suppliers which of their fares can be reissued online. Then you will know which requests you can settle yourself and which still need a call.

Question 9

Can I show the hotels on a map so my customer can see how close they are to where they are going?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can, because hotel suppliers send the location of each property along with the price and the room details. That location is what lets your website place the hotel on a map, show a customer how far it sits from a landmark, a station or the airport, and let them draw or pick an area and see only the hotels inside it. For a lot of travellers this is how they really choose, because a room that looks cheap is not a bargain if it is an hour away from the wedding or the conference they came for. On your portal this usually shows as a map beside the search results, with the price on each pin, so clicking a pin brings up that hotel. You can also offer search by area or by a well known place nearby, rather than only by city name, which helps when a customer knows the neighbourhood they want but not the hotel. There are limits worth knowing. The map is only as good as the location the supplier sends, and for small guest houses and newer properties that location is sometimes approximate or slightly off, so a pin can sit on the wrong side of a street. Some suppliers give richer location detail than others, and if you connect more than one supplier you may see better data for the same hotel from one of them. Map display can also depend on your plan and on the map service being set up for your site. Before you launch, search a city you know well and check that a handful of familiar hotels land where you expect them to on the map.

Question 10

Will my portal work properly on a mobile phone, or is it really made for people sitting at a computer?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it works on a phone, and that matters because a large share of the people who search on a travel website now do it from a mobile. The pages adjust to the size of the screen, so the search box, the results list and the payment page stay usable on a small display without the customer having to pinch and zoom. This is part of the normal portal, not a separate mobile site you have to buy or look after on the side. There are honest limits. A small screen means long flight results with lots of filters, and hotel pages with lots of photos, take more scrolling than they would on a desktop. Card payment on a mobile also depends on your payment gateway and on the customer's own bank, because the verification step hands the customer over to the bank's page, and how that page behaves on a phone is the bank's doing, not ours. If a payment keeps failing only on mobile, that is usually where the problem sits. It is also worth being clear that this is a mobile website, not an app. Your customers open it in the browser on their phone, so there is nothing to download and nothing for them to keep updated. If you want a real app with your icon on the customer's home screen, that is separate work and depends on your plan, so please ask before you promise it to a customer. The quickest check is to open your own site on your phone, run a search you would actually sell, and carry it all the way to the payment page. If anything looks cramped or a button is hard to press, tell your support contact which page and which phone, and it can be looked at.