Question 1

Will the flight price my customer sees in the search results still be the same when they come to pay?

Accepted Answer

Not always, and that is normal in flight selling. Fares come live from the airline at the moment of the search, and the cheapest seats on any flight are being sold all over the world at the same time. Between the moment your customer searches and the moment they reach the payment page, those seats can be taken by someone else, the airline can reprice the fare, or the taxes can be worked out again. A flight booking API checks the fare once more just before the ticket is issued, and that final check is the one that counts. A well set up portal deals with this by revalidating the fare before payment and telling the customer plainly if it has moved, so they can accept the new amount or go back and pick another option. How that message looks, and whether the customer sees it before or after they choose the flight, depends on how your portal is configured. Holding search results for a short while makes searching feel faster but makes a price change more likely, while going back to the airline every single time is slower and steadier. Your supplier and your plan decide how much of this you can adjust. The difference is usually small, and it can move down as well as up. What you want to avoid is collecting the money first and finding the change afterwards, because then you are left choosing between absorbing the difference yourself or going back to a customer who thought the booking was done. Ask your supplier how your portal revalidates the fare before payment and exactly what your customer is shown when the price moves, and get into the habit of telling customers that a quote holds only for that moment rather than for the rest of the day.

Question 2

Will my new travel portal show up on Google, or do I have to do something myself to get customers to find it?

Accepted Answer

No, a brand new portal will not simply appear in Google results on its own, and getting found is work that you or someone you hire will need to keep doing. What the portal gives you is a proper website on your own domain, with pages a search engine can read, page titles and descriptions you control, and text you can write in your own words. Discovery and ranking are then up to the search engine, which weighs your site against others that may have been publishing for years. The technical side is where we can help. Your site can be submitted to Google through their own free webmaster tools, your pages carry the titles and wording you choose, and everything works properly on a phone as well as a computer. Live search result pages, the ones built fresh the moment a customer types a city and a date, are not usually the pages that rank. The pages that bring visitors in are the ones you write yourself, about the destinations you sell, the tours you run, the visa or holiday questions your customers keep asking. Be realistic about how long this takes. It depends on your domain, whether it is new or has history, how much competition there is for the searches you want, and how much fresh writing you do. Nobody can promise you a position in the results. Paid search advertising is the quicker route to traffic while the free listings build up, but that is a budget you would run yourself. A sensible first step is to settle your domain name, then write a small set of honest pages about what you actually sell, and submit the site to Google so it knows you exist.

Question 3

Can my customer get their ticket and hotel voucher emailed to them automatically with my own agency branding on it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can send the ticket and the hotel voucher to your customer automatically as soon as a booking is confirmed, and the document carries your own logo, your agency name and your contact details rather than anyone else's. The way this normally works is that the moment a booking comes back confirmed, the system builds the document from the booking it already holds and emails it to the address the customer entered, with a copy to your own inbox so you keep a record. From your admin area you can usually set the logo, the colours, the footer and the wording of the covering email, and you can decide whether the fare breakdown is shown or hidden. Most agencies choose to hide what they paid the supplier and show only the total the customer has paid them. There are limits worth knowing about. The ticket number and the hotel confirmation number come from the airline and the hotel, so the voucher can only carry them once the supplier has actually returned them. For a hotel that is on request, or a flight you are holding before issuing, the first document your customer receives is a booking confirmation and the proper voucher follows when the supplier confirms. Delivery also depends on your sending domain being set up correctly, otherwise perfectly good emails can land in the spam folder. Before you go live, make one test booking to your own email address, open the ticket and the voucher as your customer would see them, and check that your logo, your terms and your contact details are all correct.

Question 4

Can I test flight bookings on my website without paying for a real ticket?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in nearly every case you can test flight bookings on your portal without paying for a real ticket. Most flight connections come with a test setup, sometimes called a sandbox or a staging environment, that behaves like the live one but issues nothing real. You can search, pick a fare, enter passenger details and complete a booking, and see on screen exactly what your customer would see, with no money moving anywhere. What a test setup will not always give you is real data. The flights, fares and seat availability there are often made up, or frozen from an older date, so a search may return results that no longer exist, or nothing at all for a route you know is flying. That is normal and it is not a fault with your website. It makes the test setup good for checking that your booking flow, your markup, your confirmation emails and your error messages all behave, but it is not the place to judge whether your prices look competitive. Whether you also get to make one real live booking before launch depends on the supplier and on your plan. Some will let you make a small real booking that you then void or cancel inside the airline's free window, some do not allow it at all, and low cost airlines in particular often have no test mode, because every booking they accept is real and paid for. Ask first, because a live booking you cannot cancel comes out of your own pocket. Before you go live, ask your supplier which environment your portal is pointing at right now, and confirm who switches it over to the live credentials when you are ready.

Question 5

Can my customer ask for something special, like a late check in or a high floor, and will the hotel really see it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can give your customer a box to type a special request, and it will be passed along with the booking, but nobody can promise the hotel will act on it. The request travels from your website to your supplier, and from the supplier to the hotel, where it sits on the reservation as a note for the front desk to read when the guest arrives. What you can send depends on the supplier you are connected to. Some accept a line of free text in English and pass it on as written. Others only accept a short set of standard requests, such as a non smoking room, twin beds instead of a double, a room on a high floor, or a late arrival, and anything typed outside that list is quietly dropped. It is worth finding out which of the two your supplier does before you put a big empty comment box on your booking page. Be honest with your customer about what happens next. A special request is never a guarantee. The hotel decides on the day, based on what rooms are free when the guest checks in, and some things, like an early check in or a connecting room, may be refused or may carry a charge the guest pays at the hotel. Wording it as a request rather than a confirmed extra saves a lot of difficult conversations later. Make one test booking with a request on it, check that the request appears on the confirmation your supplier sends back, and ask your supplier which request types they actually forward.

Question 6

Can I add my own markup to the prices my supplier sends, and change it for different customers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you set your own markup and you can charge different customers differently. The markup sits between the price your supplier returns and the price your customer sees, so what appears on your website is already your selling price. You normally choose whether it is a percentage of the fare or a flat amount per passenger or per booking, and you can usually keep separate rules for flights and for hotels, because the two behave differently. Most systems let you go further than one blanket rule. Depending on your setup you can vary the markup by airline, by supplier, by route or country, by cabin or room type, or by who is logged in, so a customer on your public website and a sub agent using your B2B panel do not see the same price. Many agencies keep a lower rule for corporate accounts that have agreed a fixed service fee with them. It is worth knowing the limits. A markup only applies to the part of the price your supplier allows you to change, so taxes and certain airline fees usually pass straight through, and some negotiated fares carry rules about what you may add on top. Whether you can stack several rules, or add a separate service fee alongside the markup, depends on your plan and on the suppliers connected to your portal. Before you go live, set one simple rule, run a few real searches and compare what your customer sees with what your supplier returned, and put a cancellation through as well so you know how your markup is treated when money goes back to the customer.

Question 7

Can I change the logo, colours and wording on my portal myself, or do I have to ask someone every time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most of the everyday look of your portal is yours to change from your own admin area, without calling a developer each time. Your logo, your colours, your company name, the wording on your home page and the contact details in the footer are settings you edit and save yourself, and the change shows on the live site straight away. That is really the point of a white label portal, it is meant to look like your brand and not like a template you borrowed from someone else. Where it gets more limited is the layout itself. Moving whole sections around, changing how the search box behaves, or redesigning the results page is usually theme work rather than a setting, so that tends to be a job for whoever supports your portal. The same goes for the booking and payment screens, because those pages have to keep working with whatever the supplier sends back, and a completely free hand there would break bookings rather than improve them. Some things are not yours to rewrite at all. Hotel photos, room descriptions and airline names come from the supplier feed, so you can usually choose what to show and in what order, but you cannot change the supplier's own words. What you can always add is your own content around it, your about page, your terms and conditions, your blog posts and your landing pages, and those are completely yours to write. Before you settle on a design, ask which parts of your plan you can change yourself and which ones need a request to your support team, and get that answer in writing so there are no surprises later.

Question 8

Can I load my own special airline fares onto my portal so they show up next to the normal ones?

Accepted Answer

Yes in many setups, but it depends on the kind of deal you have and on the plan your portal is running. The important thing to understand is that not every special fare can be made to appear inside a live search, so it is worth checking before you build a campaign around one. When an airline or a consolidator gives you a negotiated fare, it usually comes with a code or a contract number tied to your agency. That code can be attached to the search that goes out to the supplier, and the results then come back with your own price instead of the public one, so your staff and your customers see it in the normal list of flights. Other deals only exist as a rate sheet or an email from the airline, and those cannot be pulled into a live search at all. They have to be entered as a manual fare or quoted by hand, then recorded as a booking afterwards. Be ready for a coded fare to appear less often than you expect. It will only show when the search matches the conditions of your agreement, so the route, the cabin, how far ahead the customer is booking and sometimes the passenger type all have to line up. When it does not appear, that is usually the contract rules doing their job rather than the website being broken. Whether your portal can also hold manually loaded fares depends on your plan, and who is allowed to sell a negotiated fare is always the airline's decision. Gather your fare agreements together and ask your supplier which of them can be attached to a live search and which will have to be quoted by hand.

Question 9

Can I run a discount code on my website so my customers get money off when they book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can normally set up a discount code on your portal and let your customers type it in before they pay. You create the code yourself in your admin panel, decide whether it takes off a fixed amount or a percentage, and choose the dates it works between. You can usually limit it to flights only, hotels only, or the whole site, so a code you share for a festival offer does not quietly apply to everything you sell. The important thing to understand is where the money comes from. The airline or the hotel still charges you their own fare, so any discount you give is taken out of your own markup and not out of the supplier's price. It is worth checking your margin on the products the code applies to before you publish it, otherwise a popular code can end up costing you on every sale. Most portals will show the original amount and the discount separately on the payment page and on the confirmation, so your customer can see what they saved and your accounts still balance. How far you can go with the rules depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up. One use per customer, a minimum booking value, a cap on the total number of times a code can be used, or a code that only works for a particular sub agent are all common, but they are not guaranteed on every setup, so please do not assume they are there. Before you announce an offer, create a test code in your admin panel, put a booking through with it, and check that the amount actually charged to the card matches what you expect. Then ask your account manager which of the extra rules your portal supports.

Question 10

Do I need my own payment gateway to take card payments on my website, or does one come with the portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will need your own merchant account and payment gateway, and the portal is then connected to it so that the money from every booking lands in your own bank account. Most travel businesses prefer it this way, because you stay in control of your own funds and you deal directly with your own bank on charges, settlement times and chargebacks rather than waiting for someone else to pass the money on. Which gateways can be connected depends on your country and on what your plan covers. The gateways commonly used by travel companies can normally be integrated, but that is not a promise for every provider in every market, so it is worth naming the gateway you have in mind at the start rather than after the site is built. Some gateways also ask for extra approval before they will accept travel transactions, because travel is treated as a higher risk trade, and that approval sits between you and the gateway. If you do not have a gateway yet, you do not have to wait to go live. Bookings can be set up so the customer books online and your team collects payment offline by bank transfer, by card machine or in the office, and confirms once the money is in. You can switch the online card option on later without rebuilding anything. Before you go further, check whether your bank or gateway account is already approved for travel and which currencies it settles in, then share those details so the connection can be set up and tested with one small live payment before you open the site to customers.