Question 1

If the airline changes my customer's flight time after I have issued the ticket, will I find out or will they only know at the airport?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will know before your customer does. When an airline moves a flight, it files the change against the booking, and your supplier passes that back through the flight booking API, so the new timing shows against the booking in your system instead of only turning up on the day of travel. How fast you see it depends on the supplier and on the way your connection is set up. Some suppliers push the change to you as soon as the airline files it. Others expect your system to look at the booking again and pick up the new times, which means you find out on your next check rather than the same minute. Low cost airlines often work outside that flow and may write to the passenger directly, so your customer can hear about it around the same time you do. What you are allowed to do about it is the airline's decision, not something your portal controls. A small shift in the departure time usually just needs a polite call to your customer. A bigger move, a different day or a flight that is dropped altogether, normally lets you put them on another flight or ask for a refund without a penalty, but each airline sets its own line for what counts as big enough, and your supplier follows that line. Ask your supplier whether schedule change alerts come with your plan and where they arrive, and keep the habit of checking bookings again in the days before travel using contact details you know are still current.

Question 2

Are the taxes and extra fees included in the hotel price my customer sees, or will they be asked to pay more at the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Yes for the main taxes, and no for a few charges the hotel collects itself. When a room comes back from a hotel booking API, the rate normally includes the taxes the supplier can work out in advance, so the total your customer pays you at the time of booking is the room and those taxes together. What is usually not included is anything the property charges on the spot. A city or tourist tax, a resort fee, parking, breakfast where it is not part of the rate, and a refundable damage deposit are the common ones. These are paid at the hotel, often in the local currency, and they sit outside the booking you made. Most suppliers send this information along with the room, so it can be shown in your search results, on the booking page and on the voucher your customer carries. How well that works depends on the supplier. Some send mandatory charges as a clear separate amount that your portal can print on its own line. Others send only a line of text buried in the room description, and a few send nothing useful at all, which means the same hotel can look cheaper from one supplier than another simply because one of them is quieter about the extras. The sensible thing to do is book a few test rooms in different countries, one in a city that charges a tourist tax and one at a resort, and read what your search results and your voucher actually say. If those charges are not appearing anywhere, it is worth raising, because a customer who is surprised at check in will come back to you and not to the hotel.

Question 3

Will my customers be able to tell which supplier my flights and hotels actually come from?

Accepted Answer

Yes in most cases your customer never needs to know which supplier the booking came from, and that is really the point of a white label portal. The search results, the booking pages and the confirmation all carry your own name and your own logo, while the wholesaler sitting behind the connection stays out of sight. What you cannot hide, and should not try to hide, is the airline that actually flies the route or the hotel your customer is staying in, because those are the people your customer is travelling with. There are still a few places where a supplier name can slip through, so it is worth knowing them. Booking references sometimes carry a supplier prefix. If the supplier collects the money rather than you, their name can show up on your customer's card statement. Hotels quite often send their own confirmation email straight to the guest, and airlines send schedule change notices to whatever contact address sits on the ticket. That is not something a portal can simply switch off, and anyone promising you otherwise is not being straight with you. The parts you do control are usually enough. Your portal, your emails, your tickets and your hotel vouchers can all be branded as yours, and using your own payment gateway keeps your name on the statement your customer sees. How much of the rest you can change depends on the supplier you are connected to and the plan you are on, so it will not be the same for everyone. The sensible next step is to make one real test booking on your own portal and read everything your customer would receive, from the payment screen through to the voucher and the emails, then ask about anything that still shows a name that is not yours.

Question 4

Can I keep the website I already have and just add a booking engine to it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can keep the website you already have and simply add booking to it. The usual way is to give your existing site a new page, or a small search box on the home page, that carries your visitor into the booking engine. The look, the colours and your logo can be set up so the two feel like one website to your customer, even though the search and payment part is doing the heavy work behind the scenes. How smooth this feels depends on how your current site is built. If it runs on a common website builder or a content system, adding a search box or a link is usually straightforward and your own web person can do it in an afternoon. If your site is older, or was built in an unusual way, you may only be able to link out to the booking pages rather than place the search box inside your existing design. There are a couple of things worth knowing before you decide. Your booking pages may sit on a separate address, such as a sub domain of your own name, and search engines can treat that as a separate site. Payment, refunds and supplier rules still apply in the same way as they would on a full portal, because that side is set by your suppliers and your plan, not by where the search box sits. The best next step is to check what you are able to edit on your home page, or ask whoever looks after your website, and then we can tell you whether a built in search box or a linked booking section suits you better.

Question 5

Where do the hotel photos and descriptions on my website come from, and can I change them?

Accepted Answer

Yes, they come from your supplier, and in most cases you can change them. When you connect a hotel booking API, the supplier sends the hotel content across along with the rates. That content is usually the hotel name and address, a short description, the star rating, a list of facilities and a set of images. Your site displays what arrives, which is why the same hotel can look slightly different on two travel websites. Most portals let you override that content for the hotels you care about. If you sell one property often, you can normally replace the description with your own words, change the order of the pictures, or hide an image that does not show the place well. Whether you can do this for every hotel or only for a chosen few depends on your plan and on how your supplier delivers the content, so it is worth asking before you promise a hotel owner a particular look. There are honest limits. The images belong to the supplier or the hotel, not to you, so you have to stay within what their terms allow. Content also goes stale. A hotel that has been redecorated may show old pictures for a while, because the supplier has to refresh its own records first. If a hotel has almost no photos or a very thin description, that is nearly always a gap at the supplier end rather than a fault on your website. Pick your ten best selling hotels, look at them on your live site and compare them with what the hotel shows on its own page. Note down anything that looks wrong or missing, and ask your support contact whether that content can be overridden or refreshed.

Question 6

Can I protect myself from fraudulent card payments on my portal before I issue a ticket?

Accepted Answer

Yes, to a large extent, but no setup removes the risk completely, so the honest answer is that you can make fraud much less likely rather than impossible. Card fraud worries anyone selling flights online, because a ticket is issued in seconds and the money can be pulled back weeks later, so it is worth putting checks in place from the day you start selling. The main protection comes from your payment gateway rather than the portal itself. Most gateways offer address checks, card security code checks and a step where the customer has to approve the payment with their bank, usually through a code sent to their phone. When that bank approval step is switched on, the liability for a disputed payment often moves away from you and back to the card issuer, though the exact rules depend on your gateway, your country and the agreement you signed. On the portal side, the useful habit is to separate taking the money from issuing the ticket when a booking looks unusual, such as a very late departure, a card and a passenger with different names, or several bookings from the same card in a short space of time. You can hold those for a quick manual look before anything is issued, and ask the card holder for photo identification if you are not comfortable. What your portal can do here depends on the supplier and on your plan. The next thing to do is ask your payment gateway to turn on bank approval for every transaction, get in writing who carries the loss when a payment is disputed, and agree with your team which bookings you will always review by hand.

Question 7

Can I add bookings I made over the phone or directly with a hotel into my travel agency software so everything sits in one place?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can, and it is one of the most useful things to set up early. These are usually called manual or offline bookings. You type in the passenger name, the travel dates, the supplier you used, what you paid and what you charged the customer, and that booking then sits in your list alongside everything that came through your portal automatically. The reason this matters is reporting. If part of your business comes through your website and part comes from a phone call to a hotel or to a consolidator, your sales figures and your profit report will only ever tell you half the story. Once the offline ones are entered, your daily sales, your money still to collect and your profit for each booking cover the whole agency rather than one corner of it. What you should expect is a bit of typing. A manual booking cannot pull the fare rules, the cancellation deadline or the live status from a supplier, because there is no supplier connection sitting behind it. Anything you want the system to know, you have to enter yourself, and if the supplier changes something later you have to update the record by hand. Some plans also decide which of your staff are allowed to create manual bookings at all, so that is worth checking against the way your office actually works. Before you start entering them, ask whoever set up your system which fields are compulsory on a manual booking and whether you can attach the supplier confirmation as a file, so your team has the proof sitting in the same place as the record.

Question 8

If the hotel says it has no record of my customer when they arrive, who sorts that out?

Accepted Answer

The supplier you booked through sorts it out, not you and not the hotel, because the contract for that room sits between the supplier and the hotel and your booking sits with the supplier. In practice you call or write to the supplier operations desk with the reference the API gave you back at the time of booking, and they contact the hotel and get the room reinstated or find another one nearby of a similar standard. Your customer is standing at a desk while this happens, so the thing that decides how it goes is not the technology, it is whether your supplier has a team answering at that hour. Every supplier will handle a case that comes in during office hours. Not every supplier answers at two in the morning in a country on the other side of the world. This is worth understanding before it happens rather than during. Ask each supplier who you contact out of hours, how quickly they promise to answer, whether they will pay for a taxi and the difference in room rate if the customer has to be moved, and whether that promise is written into your agreement or is just goodwill. Keep the booking reference from the API and the voucher easy to find, because the first thing you will be asked for is the reference, and searching for it while a customer waits is time you do not have. Before your first season, put the out of hours contact for each supplier somewhere your whole team can reach it, and check that the reference shown on the voucher your customer carries is the same one the supplier will recognise.

Question 9

Can I take a part payment from my customer now and collect the rest closer to the travel date?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can take a part payment now and collect the balance later, but what your supplier allows is a separate question from what your own portal allows. Your system can hold the booking, record what the customer has paid, and show the balance still owing against that file, so your staff always know who still needs to be chased and by when. That side of it is under your control. The supplier side is where it gets harder. A hotel sold on a pay at hotel or a pay later rate will often let you hold the room without sending money straight away, so a deposit from your customer sits comfortably alongside it. Flights are usually the opposite. Once a ticket is issued the airline wants the whole fare, so if you have only taken a deposit you are funding the difference yourself until the customer pays the rest. Some agents get around this by holding the seats without issuing where the airline permits it, but the time you are given is short and the fare can move before you issue. You also need to decide what happens when the balance is not paid. You can set a due date on the booking, have the system remind both the customer and your team as that date comes closer, and agree in advance whether the trip is cancelled and whether the deposit is returned or kept. Before you offer part payment openly on your website, check with each supplier what their rates and fares allow, and make sure your booking terms tell the customer plainly when the balance falls due and what happens if it is late.

Question 10

Is there a limit to how many flight searches I can do in a day before my supplier cuts me off?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases there is a limit, though it is rarely a simple count of searches per day. What suppliers really watch is the balance between how many searches you send and how many bookings you actually make. Every search costs them money to process, so they expect a fair share of that traffic to turn into sales. If your search volume keeps climbing while your bookings stay flat, you may first get a polite note, then slower responses, and in the worst case your access can be paused until you talk it through. Day to day this is not something a busy agency normally trips over, because real customers searching and booking keep the balance healthy. It usually goes wrong for another reason. A portal left wide open gets crawled by robots, a comparison script hammers the search page all day, or a member of staff refreshes the same route over and over without ever selling it. Storing recent results for a short time and shutting out obvious bot traffic takes away a large slice of that waste. The exact allowance is not ours to promise, because it sits in your own agreement with the supplier. Some are relaxed while you are testing and much stricter once you go live, and some count only your busiest hour rather than the whole day. Before you launch, ask each supplier in writing what they expect from you on searches against bookings, and check that your search page is not left open to robots.