Question 1

Can I see how much baggage is included in a fare and sell extra bags through a flight booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can see what baggage is included in a fare through a flight booking API, and with many airlines you can sell extra bags as well. When the search results come back, each fare usually carries its baggage allowance along with it, saying whether it is cabin baggage only or whether checked baggage is part of the fare too. Showing that on your own search page helps your customer choose the right fare instead of finding out at the airport counter. How much detail you get depends entirely on the airline and on the supplier feeding you the fare. Some airlines return a clear allowance for every fare family, so you can tell your customer exactly what they are entitled to carry. Others send back very little, or send it only once the booking has moved further along, and in those cases the safest thing is to show what you have and ask the customer to confirm anything beyond it with the airline. Selling extra baggage is a separate step from selling the seat. Where the airline supports it, the API offers paid baggage as an add on during the booking, and you collect the money for it the same way you collect the fare. Low cost carriers tend to support this well, because extras are a large part of how they earn. Full service airlines are more mixed, and some of them will only let the passenger add bags on the airline website after the ticket has been issued. The sensible next step is to ask which of your airlines return baggage details in the search response and which of them allow paid bags to be added at the time of booking, then decide how you want to display that on your pages.

Question 2

If two of my suppliers sell the same hotel, will it show up twice on my website?

Accepted Answer

It can, and this is one of the first things agents notice once they connect more than one hotel supplier. Every supplier keeps its own code and its own spelling for a property, so the same hotel can arrive twice, under two different ids, with two different descriptions. A hotel booking API deals with this using what is usually called hotel mapping, which compares the name, the address and the map position of each property and joins the matching ones into a single listing. When the mapping is working, your customer sees one hotel with one set of photos, and the rooms from both suppliers sit together underneath it, normally with the cheaper option shown first. That is worth having, because the very same room often comes at a different rate from each supplier, and you can decide whether to keep that difference as your margin or pass the saving to your customer. It is only fair to say that matching is never perfect. Hotels with similar names on the same street, serviced apartments and small guest houses are the usual trouble, so now and then a property slips through as a duplicate, or two neighbouring hotels get merged when they should not be. How much of this you see depends on the suppliers you are connected to and on the plan you are on, and most systems let you correct a mapping by hand once you have spotted it. The simplest way to judge it is to search a city you know well with all your suppliers switched on, and look down the first page of results to see whether anything appears twice.

Question 3

Can I set a different markup for my sub agents than the one I use for my walk in customers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software lets you keep more than one markup rule and applies the right one on its own. The system looks at who is logged in when the search runs, so a sub agent signing in with their own account sees the fare with the sub agent markup on it, while a booking you make yourself at the counter picks up your retail markup instead. You set the rules once in the back office and they apply to every search from then on, without anyone having to remember to add anything by hand. How finely you can slice those rules depends on your plan and on how your account has been set up. In most cases you can go past a single flat rule and set the markup by product, so flights carry one rate and hotels another, or set it as a percentage rather than a fixed amount, or give one large sub agent their own rate that is separate from the rest. Some suppliers also allow their own negotiated rates to be handled differently, so it is worth asking before you assume a rule will reach everything. One thing to keep in mind is that a markup sits on top of whatever fare the supplier sends back, so it moves up and down with that fare. Any commission the supplier pays you is a separate matter and does not show inside the markup, which means your real earning on a booking can be more than the markup alone suggests. Before you go live, run the same search twice, once from your own login and once from a test sub agent login, and compare the two prices to be sure each rule is landing where you expect.

Question 4

Will my white label travel portal show up on Google when someone searches for flights in my town?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can be found on Google, but it will not happen on its own the day you go live. The site sits on your own domain and its pages can be read by search engines, so the basics are in place. Google still has to find the site, decide it is worth listing, and then rank it against every other travel site competing for the same words, and that takes time and steady effort from you. The part you have most control over is your own written content, not the search results themselves. Booking pages that are built fresh each time a customer searches are not the pages Google tends to rank, because the fares change by the minute and the page does not really exist until someone asks for it. What does rank is the material you write, so your home page, your about page, your destination guides and any articles about the places you sell. You can usually set the page title and the short description for those pages, and you can mention your town or your speciality in them so nearby customers find you. How much of this you can edit yourself depends on your plan and on how the portal was set up, so it is worth checking rather than assuming. Some wording on supplier driven pages comes straight from the supplier feed and is not something you can rewrite. A sensible first step is to add your portal to Google Search Console once it is live on your domain, so you can see which pages Google has actually picked up, and then begin adding your own pages around the destinations you most want to sell.

Question 5

Can the system send my customer their ticket and hotel voucher by email with my own logo on it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the confirmation emails and the travel documents go out under your own brand, not under the name of any technology provider. Once a booking is paid and confirmed, the system builds the documents your traveller needs and emails them automatically. That normally means a booking confirmation, the flight ticket details with the airline reference, and a hotel voucher the guest can show at check in. Your logo, your agency name, your contact details and your terms sit on those documents, and the email itself is sent so that a reply comes back to your own inbox. Most agencies also set the wording of the covering email once, so every customer gets the same message without anyone typing it. There are a couple of honest limits. The layout you can change is usually the branded parts, the header, the footer, the colours and the text you add, while the booking details themselves are printed the way the supplier or the airline sends them, because that is what the hotel or the airport staff will check against. Some suppliers also send their own confirmation directly to the guest, and you cannot always stop that. Whether the emails leave from your own domain name depends on a small setup step on your side so that your mail is trusted and does not land in a junk folder. When you are ready, make one test booking and send the documents to your own address, so you can see exactly what your customer will receive before a real traveller does.

Question 6

Can I try out a flight booking API before I start selling with it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in nearly every case you can. Most flight booking APIs come with a test environment, sometimes called a sandbox, where you can run searches and make bookings that are not real. Nothing is ticketed and no money moves, so you and your staff can practise without any risk to a customer. What you see in a test environment is not always the same as what you will see when you go live. Some suppliers return made up flights on a fixed set of routes, so the timings and fares can look strange and you should not read anything into them. Others give you genuine search results and only block the final ticketing step. Which of the two you get depends on the supplier and on the agreement you have with them, so it is worth asking plainly rather than assuming. The purpose of the test stage is to prove that your side works from start to finish. A search should bring back something you can put in front of a customer, a booking should come back with a reference you can find again, a cancellation should behave the way you expect, and the people who will use the screens every day should have tried them. When you are happy, going live is usually a matter of swapping the credentials rather than building anything again, although some suppliers ask to look over your site first. Ask your supplier whether test access is included in your plan and whether their test data is real or simulated, then run your most common routes through it a few times before you let a paying customer near it.

Question 7

If my customer wants a twin bed or is arriving late at night, can I pass that on to the hotel through a hotel booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can send a special request with the booking in most cases, but you cannot promise your customer it will be honoured. A hotel booking API normally has a free text field, and often a short list of common requests such as a twin or double bed, a quiet room, a high floor, adjoining rooms or a late arrival. Whatever you type there travels with the reservation to the hotel, and it usually appears on the voucher as well. The important part to explain to your customer is that a request is not a guarantee. The hotel decides at check in, based on what is free that night, and a busy property may simply not have a twin room left even though the request reached them. The one request that carries more weight is a late arrival, because it tells the front desk to hold the room rather than release it, so it is always worth adding when the guest lands after the evening. What the field will accept varies by supplier. Some pass long free text through untouched, some cut it short, and some only accept requests chosen from their own list. A few will not read anything written in a language other than English, so it is safest to write requests in plain short English sentences and keep them to what really matters for that stay. Before you rely on it, make a test booking with a request on it and check that the wording comes back unchanged on the confirmation you receive.

Question 8

Can my travel agency software handle more than one branch office and keep the sales for each one separate?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software can handle more than one branch office and keep the sales for each branch separate. The usual way this works is that every branch is set up as its own unit inside the same account, and every staff login is tied to the branch that person works in. When a booking is made the system records which branch it came from, so the sales, the payments and the commission sit under that branch instead of going into one big pile. What each person sees then depends on who is logged in. A staff member at one branch normally sees only the bookings made by that branch, while you as the owner see everything and can compare one office against another. Many systems also let you give a branch manager a middle level of access, so that person can see the whole of their own office but nothing belonging to the other branches. Where this gets less straightforward is money and settings. Some setups let each branch have its own markup, its own payment account and its own invoice layout, while others keep those things at company level so every branch shares them. That difference usually comes down to the plan you are on and how the software was built, so it is worth asking rather than assuming. The same is true of reporting, because a system that records the branch on every booking does not always split the accounting reports the same way. Before you commit, write down the few things you really need kept apart, such as staff access, sales reports and invoices, and check each one against what the software actually does today.

Question 9

Can I use my own payment gateway on my white label travel portal so the money goes straight into my account?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you connect your own payment gateway to the portal, so the money your customers pay lands in your own merchant account and not in somebody else's. The portal simply hands the customer over to the gateway at the payment step, takes back the yes or no answer, and then goes on to make the booking with the supplier. From your customer's side it feels like one smooth process on your own website. Which gateways can be connected depends on where your business is registered and on what your bank and your gateway provider allow. Most of the well known gateways used by travel businesses can be fitted, and card payments, and in many countries bank transfer or wallet options as well, can be switched on. You will normally need your own merchant account and the details the gateway gives you before anything can be joined up, and that part sits between you and your bank, not with the portal. There are limits worth knowing. Refunds usually have to be done through the gateway or through the portal's own refund step, and the money can take several working days to reach the customer, which is set by the card networks and not by us. Some gateways also charge for chargebacks or hold a rolling reserve when a business is new, so it is worth reading their terms before you commit. Which gateways are available to you may also depend on the plan you are on. The next thing to do is to speak to your bank or gateway provider about a travel merchant account, then check that the gateway you have in mind can be connected before you set your launch date.

Question 10

Do I have to install travel agency software on my office computers, or does it work in a web browser?

Accepted Answer

No, in most cases you do not have to install anything on your office computers. Modern travel agency software runs in a web browser, so you open your web address, sign in with your own username and password, and start working. The same login works on a laptop at home, on a machine in a branch office, or on a computer you borrow while you are travelling. That way of working suits a small team. Nobody has to be paid to set up every new machine, and when the system is improved everyone gets the change at the same time without anyone downloading an update. It also means you need a steady internet connection, because if the connection drops you will not be able to search or book until it comes back. There are a few exceptions worth being honest about. Some agencies still need a small helper program on one machine for jobs like printing tickets on special stationery, running a card machine, or reaching an older booking terminal given to you by an airline or a consolidator. Whether any of that applies to you depends on your suppliers and on the plan you are on, not on the software by itself. Before you commit, ask whether the system is fully browser based, which browsers it has been tested on, and what happens to work in progress if your internet goes down for a few minutes. It is also worth trying it on your own phone or tablet, since that is often where you will need it most when you are away from the desk.