Question 1

Can I be sure the fare I see in the search results will still be the same when my customer goes to pay?

Accepted Answer

Usually yes, but not always. The fares you see in a search are the ones the airline was offering at the moment that search ran, and an airline can move a price or sell the last seats at that price while your customer is still deciding. Most bookings are quick enough that nothing changes, so in day to day work the fare you quote is the fare your customer pays. Before the booking is confirmed, a flight booking API checks the fare again with the airline. That check tells you whether the fare is still live, and if it has moved it gives you the new one before any money is taken. This is where a change shows up, not after the ticket is issued, so your customer is never charged something they did not agree to. A price is more likely to move when the route is busy, when only a few seats are left at the cheaper fare, when the fare is part of a short sale, or when a lot of time passes between the search and the payment. Taxes and surcharges can also be worked out again at that final check. How often this happens depends on the airline and on the supplier behind the fare, so nobody can honestly promise it will never happen to you. Keep the gap between searching and paying as short as you can, and always show your customer the confirmed fare from that final check before you take their money.

Question 2

Can my white label travel portal be shown in another language for customers who do not read English?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can be offered in more than one language, though how much of the page actually changes depends on where each piece of text comes from. The parts that belong to the portal itself, such as the menus, the search form, the buttons, the checkout steps and the confirmation emails your customer receives, can be translated and saved for every language you want to sell in. Your customer either picks a language from the site or is shown one based on their browser settings, and the whole frame of the site switches over. The harder part is the content that arrives from your suppliers. Hotel names, room descriptions, property facilities, fare rules and airline conditions reach the portal through the API in whatever languages that supplier chooses to publish. Some suppliers return several languages, some return English only. Where a supplier does not offer the language you want, that block of text stays in English even though everything around it has changed, and we cannot translate it for you reliably because the wording is contractual. Anything you write yourself is fully yours to control. Your destination pages, your terms, your about page and your help text can each be kept in a separate version per language and edited from your admin area, so you are never stuck with a translation you did not approve. The same applies to the wording in your emails. If you have a language in mind, tell us which one and which suppliers you plan to use, and we will check what those suppliers actually return before you promise it to your customers.

Question 3

Can a flight booking API show my customers the fares in their own currency?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it can. A flight booking API will usually let you ask for fares in a currency of your choosing, and the search results come back converted so your customer sees a familiar figure instead of doing the maths themselves. You set the currency either for your whole portal or per search, so a visitor from one country can be shown one currency while a visitor from another is shown a different one. What you need to understand is that the conversion is normally a display conversion. The airline still holds the fare in its own currency, and the rate used to convert it comes from the supplier, not from a live bank rate. That means the amount your customer sees can move slightly from one day to the next, and the amount finally settled with the airline may not match the converted figure to the last unit. Some suppliers support true multi currency selling where the ticket itself is priced and paid in the chosen currency, but that depends on the supplier agreement and the markets they are set up for. The currency your customer pays in also has to line up with your payment gateway. If the gateway only settles in one currency, showing prices in five will still end with a charge in that one, and the customer's own bank may add a conversion charge on top. It is worth deciding early which currencies you genuinely want to sell in rather than switching them all on. Before you promise anything to your customers, check with your supplier which currencies they support for search and for ticketing, and check what your payment provider can actually settle, then match the list on your portal to whichever of those two is shorter.

Question 4

Can my customers make their own account on my white label travel portal and look back at the trips they booked with me?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label travel portal can let your customers create their own account, sign in later and see the trips they have booked with you. When a booking is made, it is saved against the email address the customer used, so the next time they log in they can see the trip, the names of the travellers and the confirmation details without having to ring your office. Most portals also let them set a password, keep their own contact details up to date and download their ticket or voucher again if they have lost the first copy. What they are allowed to do once they are inside that account depends on your plan and on the supplier behind each booking. Viewing a trip and printing the paperwork is usually simple. Cancelling or changing a trip from the customer account is a different matter, because the request has to go back to the airline or the hotel, and some suppliers will not accept it unless an agent does it. If you would rather every change came through your team, that part can normally be switched off so the account is there to look at and nothing more. It is worth thinking about older trips too. Bookings made before you moved to the portal, or ones you typed in by hand, will only show in a customer account if that information was carried across properly, so the history your customers see may start from the day you went live. Open your portal settings and check whether customer accounts are turned on, then decide whether you want customers changing their own bookings or simply viewing them.

Question 5

Can I search for a room for a family with children through a hotel booking API and get the right price for the kids?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can, as long as you send the number of children and the age of each child with the search. Hotel booking APIs treat children differently from adults, and almost every supplier decides the price from the age, not just from the head count. If you send only the number of guests without ages, you will usually either get an error back or a price that is worked out as if everyone in the room were an adult, which is normally higher than what the family should pay. The reason the ages matter so much is that each hotel sets its own rules. One property may let a young child stay free in the existing beds, another may charge for an extra bed, and another may treat an older child as an adult from a certain birthday onwards. When you pass the ages, the supplier applies the correct rule for that property and the price you show your customer is the price the room really costs. There are limits worth knowing about. Every hotel has a maximum number of people allowed in one room, so a larger family may need two rooms rather than one, and the search will simply return nothing if you ask for more guests than a room can hold. Some suppliers also collect a charge for a child at the hotel instead of in the booking, and whether that shows in your results depends on the supplier and on what your plan gives you access to. Before you go live with family searches, run a test booking with children of different ages on your own portal and compare what comes back with what the hotel itself is showing, so you know the ages are reaching the supplier correctly.

Question 6

When my customer pays for a flight, does the ticket get issued straight away or do I have to do something myself?

Accepted Answer

Usually yes, the ticket is issued within seconds of the payment going through, but it does depend on how your account with the supplier has been set up. On a normal instant ticketing setup, once the payment is confirmed the booking request goes to the airline, the seat is confirmed and a ticket number comes back in a few seconds. Your customer can be sent the electronic ticket right away and there is nothing more for you to do. This is what most agencies prefer, because nobody is left waiting and no seat is sitting unpaid. Some accounts are deliberately set up the other way, where the booking is held first and ticketing is a separate step. That is common when you want to check the fare before committing, when the fare is on a deposit or a group contract, or when someone in your own team has to approve the payment first. The booking then shows as confirmed but not ticketed until a person issues it, and the airline gives a deadline after which the seat is released. There are also times when the airline itself is slow to answer or the fare needs a manual check, so a booking you expected to be instant takes longer than usual. Whichever way you are set up, treat a booking as finished only when a ticket number has come back, not when the money has been taken. Ask whoever set up your account which of the two applies to your flights, and if it is the second one, make sure somebody is watching for bookings that are still waiting to be issued.

Question 7

Can I give my staff their own logins on my white label travel portal so they only see what they need to?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can give each member of your staff their own login on a white label travel portal, and in most cases you can also decide what each of them is allowed to see and do. Sharing one password between everyone is a common habit in small agencies, but it makes it impossible to tell who made a booking or who changed something afterwards, so separate logins are worth setting up from the very start. Access is usually managed through roles. A counter staff role might be able to search, quote and make bookings, while only a manager or owner role can cancel a booking, process a refund, change the markup you add on top of the supplier rates, or open the reports that show how the business is doing. Many portals also let you hide the supplier cost from your staff so that they only see the selling price your customer pays. How detailed this gets depends on the portal and on the plan you are on. Some setups offer only a few fixed roles that you cannot alter, while others let you switch individual permissions on and off one by one. If you have more than one branch or office, do not assume that staff will automatically be limited to their own branch's bookings, because that is a separate feature and not every system includes it. Before you ask, write down every person who will use the portal and the one or two things you would not want each of them doing, then check on a demo account that those actions really are blocked for that role.

Question 8

Will a hotel booking API show me the local taxes and resort fees my customer has to pay at the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most hotel booking APIs do return these extra charges, but they usually arrive as a separate piece of information from the room price, so you need to show them to your customer yourself. The reason is that the money is split into two parts. There is the amount your customer pays you at the time of booking, which is the room and anything the supplier collects up front, and there is the amount the hotel collects at the desk. City tax, tourist tax, resort fees, parking and cleaning charges normally sit in that second group. A good hotel booking API marks them as payable at the property and often gives them in the hotel's own currency rather than the one your customer is shopping in. Be aware that how complete this information is depends on the supplier and on the hotel itself. Some suppliers send a clear, structured amount that you can drop straight into a summary box. Others send only a line of text written by the property, which you can display but cannot add up or convert. Where the charge is set in local currency, the amount your customer hands over at check in can also differ a little from what you quoted, because the exchange rate moves between booking and arrival. The sensible next step is to run a few test searches in cities that are known for tourist taxes and look closely at what your supplier actually returns, then make sure that wording is repeated on your booking summary, your confirmation email and your hotel voucher so that nobody is surprised at the reception desk.

Question 9

Can my travel agency software handle corporate clients who want one invoice at the end of the month instead of paying for each trip?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software can hold a corporate client on account, so their staff book trips through the month and you raise a single invoice afterwards instead of taking payment every time. This is a normal way of working for business travel, and it is usually set up per company rather than per traveller. In practice you create the company as a customer in the system, mark it as a credit or account customer, and set a limit on how much it can book before payment is needed. Bookings made by that company are then confirmed without a card being charged, and they are tagged to the account so you can pull them all together later. At the end of your billing period you generate one statement or invoice covering every trip taken, usually with each booking listed as a line so their finance team can check it. There are limits to be aware of. Your own supplier may still want paying at the time of booking, so offering credit to a client means you are carrying that cost until they settle, and the software can track it but cannot fund it. Some suppliers and some fare types also insist on immediate payment and will not sit on an account, and how much of this is available to you can depend on your plan. Ticket time limits still apply, so an unpaid booking can still be cancelled by the airline. Before you offer this to a client, decide what credit limit and payment terms you are comfortable with, then ask your provider to show you how account customers and monthly statements are set up in your system.

Question 10

If the airline changes the departure time or cancels the flight, will the booking API let me know?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it will, but how quickly the news reaches you depends on the airline and the supplier you booked through. When an airline moves a departure time or cancels a service, that change is passed down to whoever holds the booking. A flight booking API can then show it against the booking on your side, so you can see the new time or the cancellation without having to check every file by hand. What you cannot count on is instant notice. Some airlines send the change within minutes, others take a day or more, and a few of the low cost carriers prefer to write to the passenger directly rather than tell the agent who made the booking. Because of that gap, most agencies still take a quick look at their departures for the next few days rather than trusting the alert on its own. What you are able to do about the change also varies. Sometimes you can accept the new time, ask for a different flight, or start a refund yourself through the same connection. Other times, particularly on complicated trips or with stricter airlines, the change has to be sorted out by the airline or the supplier, and all the connection can do is tell you that something has moved. It is worth asking your supplier how these changes are sent to you, whether they arrive by email or appear on the booking itself, and which of them you are allowed to act on without calling anybody.