Question 1

Can I sell low cost airlines and the normal airlines together on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most flight booking APIs let you sell low cost airlines and full service airlines side by side, so your customer sees both in the same list of results and does not have to know which is which before they choose. Behind the scenes the two behave differently, and it helps to know that before you start selling. Low cost airline fares are usually sold on the spot, which means the seat is paid for and confirmed in one step, and there is often no way to hold it while your customer thinks about it. They are also more likely to be non refundable, and things like a checked bag, a meal or a chosen seat are sold as extras rather than being part of the fare. Full service airline fares more often allow a hold, a proper refund calculation and a date change, and they usually include a bag already. What you actually get depends on your supplier and on the part of the world you sell in. No supplier carries every low cost airline, so there will be carriers your customers know locally that simply do not appear in your results, and some suppliers price low cost content differently or keep it on a separate plan. On your side you can normally set a different markup for the two types, which is worth doing because the margins are not the same. Before you build your selling around it, write down the airlines your customers ask for most and ask your supplier to confirm which of those they can really book and issue for you.

Question 2

Will my travel website work properly on a mobile phone, or do my customers need to use a computer?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your travel website should work properly on a phone, and in practice most of your customers will be using one. A portal built today is normally responsive, which simply means the same website rearranges itself to fit whatever screen it is opened on. The search boxes stack instead of sitting side by side, the hotel photos resize, and the buttons get bigger so they are easy to tap with a thumb. You do not need a separate mobile website or an app for this to happen. Where it gets less tidy is on the busiest pages. A flight results page with many filters, or a long hotel page with a map and several room types, has a lot to fit on a small screen, so some of it moves behind a menu or a show more link. If you have had extra pages designed specially for you, those need to be checked on a phone as well, because a custom page does not automatically behave the same way. And if part of the journey hands over to a supplier or to your payment provider, that screen belongs to them, and how well it reads on a phone is down to them, not to us. The staff side is a different matter. Your back office is usable on a phone for looking up a booking or checking a payment while you are out, but issuing tickets, making changes and handling refunds is far more comfortable on a proper screen, and that is how most agencies end up using it. The quickest way to know exactly where you stand is to open your own site on your own phone, run a real search, and follow it all the way through to the payment page before you decide anything.

Question 3

How quickly do hotel search results come back on my website, and will adding more suppliers make it slower?

Accepted Answer

Yes, hotel searches usually come back quickly, but the speed depends on which suppliers you have switched on and how wide the search is. When a customer searches for a city, the request goes out to every hotel supplier connected to your portal at the same time, and each one answers at its own pace. The slowest supplier is usually what decides how long the page takes. A broad search, such as a whole city for a long stay with more than one room, will always take longer than looking up a single property for a single night, because there is simply more for each supplier to price and send back. To stop one slow supplier holding up the whole page, a time limit is normally set for each connection, so anything that has not answered in time is left out of that search rather than making your customer wait. Results can also be shown as they arrive instead of all at the end. What cannot be promised is that every supplier will be fast, because their response time is theirs and not ours, and some are noticeably slower than others at busy times of the year. If your search feels slow, look at which suppliers are switched on and whether any of them are adding very little to your results, and ask any new supplier about their normal response times before you sign with them.

Question 4

If one of my suppliers goes down, will my whole website stop working or will it still show the other suppliers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, if one supplier goes offline your website normally keeps working and shows the results that came back from your other suppliers. When a customer searches, the request goes out to every supplier you have switched on, and each one answers on its own. If one of them does not answer in time, or answers with an error, that supplier is simply left out of the list and the rest of the results are shown as usual. There are limits worth knowing. If the supplier that is down is the only one you have connected for that product, the search will come back empty and there is nothing the system can put in its place. A supplier can also be slow rather than fully down, and then the search takes longer before their results are dropped. Whether you get any warning of an outage depends on the supplier, as some announce planned maintenance and others do not. Bookings are different from searches. If a supplier is down while your customer is paying, that booking cannot be completed until they are back, and the same is true for a cancellation or an amendment on a booking that was made with them. The bookings you already hold are not lost, they simply cannot be changed until the connection is working again. The most useful thing you can do is check how many live suppliers you have for each product you sell, so that no part of your website rests on a single connection, and ask your support contact to tell you when a supplier is taken offline for maintenance.

Question 5

Can I see the customers who started a booking on my portal but did not pay, so I can call them back?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can see the bookings that were started on your portal and never paid for, and those are usually the best follow up calls you will make all week. When a customer fills in their details and then drops off at the payment step, that attempt is normally still sitting in your admin area with a status showing it was not paid or that the payment failed. You can see the route or the hotel they were looking at, the travel dates and the contact details they typed in, which is enough for one of your staff to ring them and finish the sale over the phone. The same is true of any enquiry or callback form you put on the site, as those come into the same place for someone to pick up. Where it stops is with the visitor who only searched and then closed the window. That person never gave you a name or a number, so there is nothing to call, and no honest system can tell you who they were. You will see that traffic as visits in your website statistics, but not as people. It is also worth remembering that the rules on contacting customers differ from one country to another, so a follow up call or message needs to sit inside whatever applies where you trade, and how much of this you can see depends on your plan and how your portal is set up. Have a look in your admin for the list of unpaid or failed bookings, and make working through it a daily habit for one person rather than something you check when you remember.

Question 6

If my customer changes their mind about the dates, can I amend a hotel booking instead of cancelling and booking again?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes, but not always, and it depends on the supplier behind that rate. Some hotel suppliers accept an amendment through the hotel booking API, so you can send the new check in and check out dates against the same booking reference and your customer keeps the original confirmation. Others do not offer an amendment call at all, and the only way to move the stay is to cancel the existing booking and make a fresh one. Even where an amendment is possible, the new dates still have to be available and they have to be priced again. The rate your customer paid was for those particular nights, so shifting the stay usually means the supplier recalculates the cost. If the new dates come out higher there will be a difference to collect, and if they come out lower, whether that difference comes back is set by the supplier rules rather than by you. A rate that was non refundable when you booked it normally stays non refundable, so a date change may be refused even when the room is sitting empty. Cancel and rebook is the fallback, and it is only comfortable while the booking is still inside its free cancellation window. Outside that window you would carry the penalty on the old booking and pay the full price on the new one, which can cost your customer more than the change is worth. Before you promise a date change, open the booking, see which supplier it came from and check what its cancellation deadline is, then try the amendment first and keep cancel and rebook as your second option.

Question 7

Can I see how much profit I made on each booking in one report?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Travel agency software normally stores both the cost the supplier charged you and the price you sold at, so the difference shows on the booking itself and adds up in a sales report you can run for any date range you choose. How accurate that figure is depends on where the booking came from. Anything booked through your own portal or through a connected API carries the supplier cost across on its own, so the margin is worked out for you without anyone typing it in. Bookings you enter by hand, such as an offline hotel or a ticket you bought from a consolidator, are only as correct as the cost you key in yourself, so it is worth being disciplined about that. Payment gateway charges are usually not part of the supplier cost either, so whether they appear in your profit figure depends on your plan and how your account is set up. Most systems also let you break the same report down by branch, by staff member, by sub agent or by product, which is where the report becomes genuinely useful, because it tells you which part of your business is actually earning and which is just busy. Refunds and cancellations should pull through as well, though the timing follows the supplier, since your margin can only be corrected once the supplier confirms what is actually being refunded. Before you lean on it for your accounts, open a handful of recent bookings and check that the cost price on screen matches the supplier invoice you were sent, then export a full month and compare the totals with your own records.

Question 8

If my customer wants to cancel their flight, can I find out how much money they will get back before I actually cancel it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can ask for a refund quote through a flight booking API before you cancel anything, so you can tell your customer what they are likely to get back instead of guessing. The way it works is that you send the booking reference to the refund quote request, and the reply comes back with the amount the airline is willing to return, the penalty it is holding, and the taxes that can be given back. Some airlines return the taxes even on a non refundable fare, and that is often the only money your customer will see. Anything you charged on top as your own service fee is your own decision and the airline knows nothing about it, so you have to add it back or keep it yourself. Be honest with yourself that this does not work the same everywhere. Many full service airlines support a proper refund quote, while several low cost carriers do not offer one at all and will only tell you the outcome after the cancellation has already gone through. Even when a quote does come back, some suppliers mark it as an estimate, because the amount is only fixed when the airline processes the refund, and the money itself can take weeks to reach your account. Before you promise anything, check with your supplier which airlines in your content support a refund quote and which ones do not, and get into the habit of showing the quoted amount to your customer in writing and having them agree to it before you send the cancellation.

Question 9

Can my customers search for hotels near an airport or a landmark instead of just typing a city name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases. As well as searching a whole city, a hotel booking API will normally let you search around a point on the map with a distance around it, so your customer can look for hotels near an airport, near a railway station, near a hospital or near a stadium, and see the closest ones first rather than scrolling through every property in the city. What happens behind the search box is that the place your customer typed has to be turned into a location the supplier understands. Cities are easy, because every supplier keeps its own list of destinations. Airports and landmarks depend on whether the supplier holds that point in its own data, or whether the name has to be looked up on a map first and then searched as a point with a distance around it. Coverage is not the same everywhere, so a well known airport will work in almost any country, while a small local landmark may not be recognised at all. Two honest limits are worth knowing. The distance you see is measured in a straight line and not by road, so a hotel that looks close can still be a slow drive in traffic. And the distance is only as good as the address the supplier holds for the hotel, which is now and then a little off, so a property can sit in the wrong spot on the map. The best next step is to try the places your own customers actually ask about and see what comes back for each one. The ones that give good results are the ones worth putting on your home page as ready made searches.

Question 10

Can I put together a quote with a few different options and send it to my customer to pick from?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can build a quote with more than one option and send it to your customer to choose from. This is one of the most used parts of travel agency software, because most enquiries do not turn into a booking on the first reply. The usual way it works is that you search as you normally would, then instead of booking straight away you save the flights or the hotels you like into a quote. You can place two or three choices next to each other, write a short note explaining the difference between them, and apply your own markup to each one before it goes out. The quote then reaches your customer as an email or as a link they can open on their phone, carrying your own logo and colours rather than a supplier name. There is a limit you should know about. What your customer opens is a saved copy of your search, not a live booking. Fares and room rates can move between the moment you build the quote and the moment your customer replies, so the system checks availability and price again when they pick an option, and the amount they pay may not match what you first sent. Many suppliers also will not hold a seat or a room while a customer thinks it over, so treat a quote as a proposal and not as a promise. Whether your customer can accept and pay straight from the quote, or whether you make the booking yourself once they reply, depends on your plan and on which products you have switched on. Send yourself a test quote first so you can see exactly what lands in your customer inbox, and ask our team to show you how the follow up reminders on quotes are set up for your portal.