Question 1

Can I change the look of my white label travel portal, like the logo and the colours, myself without hiring a developer?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most of the everyday look of a white label travel portal is meant to be changed by you, without a developer. Your logo, your colours, your company name, the wording on the home page and the pictures you show at the top are normally settings you edit from an admin panel and save, and the change appears on the live site straight away. That is the whole point of a white label portal. It carries your brand and your name, not anyone else's. Where it gets more limited is the layout itself. The position of the search box, the way search results are listed, and the steps a customer goes through to pay are built to work in a certain order, partly because they are tied to what the suppliers send back and what they need in return. You can usually restyle those pages so they match your brand, but moving the pieces around, or asking for a page that works in a completely different way, is normally a development job rather than a setting you flip yourself. Fonts, extra pages and small text edits tend to sit in the middle. Many portals let you add your own pages and change wording whenever you like, while a fully custom design is treated as a separate piece of work and depends on your plan. It is fair to ask for that in writing rather than assuming it is included. Before you commit to anything, ask to be shown the admin panel where the branding settings actually live, and ask plainly which parts of the design you can change on your own and which ones have to be raised as a request.

Question 2

Will a hotel booking API tell me by what date my customer can cancel their room without losing money?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it will. When a hotel booking API returns a room, it normally carries the cancellation terms for that exact rate along with it, including the date and time after which a charge starts to apply. Your portal can put that in front of your customer before they confirm, so nobody has to guess and you are not left explaining it afterwards. How much detail you get varies by supplier. Some send a single clear deadline that you can display as a plain sentence. Some send a set of rules where the charge changes as the arrival date gets closer, so you have to show more than one line. A few send little more than a free to cancel or non refundable flag. Rates sold as non refundable will say so up front, and those cannot be cancelled without a loss however early your customer asks. The thing most often missed is the time zone. A cancellation deadline is normally set in the hotel's local time, so a room that looks safe to cancel in your own evening can already be past its deadline where the hotel is. It helps to show the deadline together with its time zone on screen, and to treat anything close to the arrival date as urgent rather than routine. Ask your supplier which cancellation fields their API sends and how reliable they are, then make sure your portal repeats that same wording on the confirmation your customer receives.

Question 3

Can I load my own contracted hotel rates into my travel agency software and sell them alongside the supplier ones?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software lets you load rates you have contracted directly with a hotel and sell them next to the rates coming from your suppliers, though how you load them depends on your plan and on how many properties you have contracted. The usual way is a simple upload. You prepare a sheet with the hotel, the room type, the dates, the rate and the cancellation rules you agreed with the property, and the system takes that in as your own inventory. Once it is in, your customer sees those rooms in the same search results as the supplier rooms, so they never have to look in two places. You also decide what happens when the same hotel comes from both your own contract and a supplier, whether your rate always wins or whether both are shown and the cheaper one sits on top. It is worth being honest about the work behind it. Your own rates are yours to keep correct, so if the hotel changes its availability or closes out a date, you have to update that yourself, either in the system or by sending a fresh sheet. Supplier rates refresh on their own because the supplier sends them live, and your contracted ones do not. Agencies with only a few contracts manage this comfortably, and those with many usually give one person the job of keeping the rates current. If you want to make a start, gather one signed contract with its rates, room types and cancellation terms, and ask for a single test property to be set up first, so you can see how it looks to a customer before you load the rest.

Question 4

If my customer wants to change their travel date after booking, can I do that through a flight booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes in many cases, although a date change is more involved than making a fresh booking, and some tickets do not allow one at all. When a change is possible, the system can look up the new flight, work out what the change costs and move the customer onto the later date, then give you an updated ticket. The cost is usually made of two parts, a change fee set by the airline and the difference between what your customer originally paid and what the new flight sells for on the day you make the change. That means a cheap seat which has since sold out can leave the new date costing more than the whole original trip. Both parts come from the airline rather than from you, and neither can be known for certain until the new flight is picked. It gets less automatic with the cheapest fares, with tickets where part of the journey has already been flown, and with trips built from two different airlines, since those often have to be handled by a person speaking to the airline or the supplier instead of by the system on its own. Low cost airlines work differently again, as many of them treat a date change as their own process with their own charges. What your portal can do on its own therefore depends on the airline, on the fare bought, and on what your supplier passes through to you. Before you promise a customer anything, look at the fare rules held against the booking, because they tell you whether a change is allowed and roughly what it will cost, and agree with your supplier which changes your own team can make and which ones have to go back to them.

Question 5

Can I take a booking for a large group, like a big family or a company trip, on my white label travel portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but only up to the passenger limit the supplier allows on a single booking. Your portal handles a family or a small company trip in the normal way, and for most enquiries that is all you need. Once the party gets larger than the limit the airline or the hotel sets for one booking, the search will either stop returning results or come back empty, because at that size the supplier treats the trip as a group and wants to quote it by hand. When that happens you have two sensible options. You can split the party across more than one booking, which usually works, although you should warn your customer that the price can move between bookings and that seats or rooms may not end up together. Or you can approach the airline or the hotel directly, ask for a group quote, and handle the names and the payment yourself, the way agents did before portals existed. A booking you arrange that way still belongs in your system. You can enter it as a manual booking so the customer, the payment and the travel documents sit alongside everything else, and your reports stay complete at the end of the month. Whether your site also carries a group enquiry form, so that large parties reach you instead of hitting a dead end in search, depends on the plan and the setup you have chosen. The useful next step is to check the passenger limit on each supplier you are connected to, since it is not the same everywhere, and then decide how you want large enquiries to come through to you.

Question 6

Will the hotel photos and descriptions come through a hotel booking API, or do I have to add them myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in almost every case the photos, descriptions and facility lists come through with the hotel data, so you do not have to write them or collect pictures yourself. When a customer opens a property on your site, the images, the room names, the address and the list of what the hotel offers are all supplied for you. This content usually arrives separately from the live prices. Prices and availability change by the minute, so those are fetched fresh every time somebody searches, while the pictures and the written descriptions are delivered as a bulk file that your portal stores and refreshes now and then. That is why the text on a hotel page loads instantly even when the room rates take a few seconds. How rich the content is depends entirely on the supplier and on the individual property. Well known city hotels tend to have plenty of good images and a full description, while small guest houses in quieter places may have only one or two pictures and a couple of short lines. Descriptions are often in English only, and translations, where they exist, are not always polished. There are also usage rules to respect, because the images belong to the hotel or the supplier and you are normally allowed to show them on your own portal but not to sell them on or use them elsewhere. Before you commit, ask your supplier whether the content feed is included in your plan and how often you are allowed to refresh it, then look at a handful of real properties in the destinations you sell most, so you know what your customers will actually see.

Question 7

Can I move my old bookings and customer details into new travel agency software when I switch from the system I use now?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can, as long as you are able to get the information out of your current system first. Customer records, past bookings, supplier details and your staff list can usually be brought into new travel agency software, normally from a spreadsheet or a plain export file that your existing provider gives you. What transfers cleanly and what does not is worth understanding before you start. Names, contact details, travel dates, destinations, reference numbers and the amounts you charged usually come across without much trouble. Things that live inside the old system's own screens, such as saved vouchers, email history or the live link to a booking held by an airline or a hotel, often cannot be carried over as working records. Older bookings normally arrive as history that you can search and report on rather than as live bookings you can change, because any change still has to go back to the supplier who holds that booking. How much you can move also depends on your current provider and on your plan. Some let you download everything yourself at any time, some will only produce an export when you ask for it, and a few hand over less than you expect. The work involved depends on how tidy your records are, since duplicates, missing fields and free text notes usually need cleaning before they will import properly. Before you commit to anything, ask your current provider in writing exactly what export they will give you and in what format, then ask your new provider to run a test import with a small sample of that file so you can see how your records look once they land.

Question 8

Can I make a booking on my portal for a customer who calls me on the phone?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. Your portal has an agent side as well as the public side, so when a customer rings you, you sign in and run the same search they would have run at home, then book it in their name. The prices, the fare rules and the availability are the same either way, because the search is going out to the same suppliers. The real difference is payment. On a phone booking the customer is not sitting in front of the screen to type in their card details, so you either pay from your own agency balance and collect from them separately, or you send them a secure payment link and complete the booking once it has gone through. Which of those two you can use depends on the payment methods enabled on your plan, so it is worth checking that before you promise a customer anything. Take extra care with the passenger details. A name written down over the phone is the most common reason a ticket has to be corrected later. Ask the customer to read the name out exactly as it appears in the passport, and confirm the date of birth and the contact email before you issue, because some airlines and hotels charge for a change afterwards and a few will not allow one at all. Once it is booked, a phone booking sits in the same list as one a customer made themselves, and the confirmation still goes out under your own company name, so there is nothing extra for you to do. If most of your business comes in by phone, have a look at the agent booking screen with your team so they are comfortable working there rather than in the customer view.

Question 9

Can my customers pick their own seat on the plane when they book on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, on many flights they can, but not on all of them. Seat selection works only when the airline shares its seat map with the supplier behind the API, and not every airline does that for every fare. Where the seat map does come through, your customer sees the cabin layout during booking and can choose a window or an aisle in the usual way. The airline sets the rules, not the portal. Some seats are free, some are paid, and some are held back until closer to departure or until check in opens. When an airline charges for a seat, that charge is passed on to your customer at the time they choose it, and it is only really confirmed once the airline has accepted it. If an airline does not offer seats through the API at all, your customer can usually still choose one later on the airline's own site using the booking reference. It is worth being careful about what you promise. A seat shown as chosen can still change if the airline swaps the aircraft or reorganises the cabin, which happens more often than most travellers expect. Telling your customer that a seat is requested and normally held, rather than guaranteed, saves an awkward conversation later. Ask us which of your airline sources return seat maps and which do not, so you know before you sell which of your flights can offer seat choice at the time of booking.

Question 10

Can I run my white label travel portal on my own domain name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your white label travel portal can run on your own domain name, so your customers never see anyone else's web address while they search and book. In practice you keep buying and owning the domain yourself, and you point it at the portal by making a small change with the company you bought it from. You can use your main web address if you do not have another site sitting there, or a booking subdomain if your existing website is built elsewhere and you only want the booking part on the portal. A security certificate is set up for whichever address you choose, so the padlock and the secure prefix show as normal. There are a few honest limits. You need to own the domain and be able to get into its settings, or have someone who can, because that change has to be made on your side. Once it is made, it takes a little while to spread across the internet, so the new address may not work everywhere at the same moment. Some steps may still pass through an address that is not yours, for example a payment page hosted by your payment provider or an airline page for check in, and that is normal and safe. Sending your booking emails from your own domain is a separate setup with its own records. Before you start, find out who holds the login for your domain settings, and decide whether you want the portal on your main address or on a booking subdomain, because that choice is much easier to make now than to change later.