Question 1

Can I choose which hotels show on my website instead of listing every property the supplier has?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. A hotel booking API will normally return everything the supplier holds in a destination, and it is your portal that decides how much of that the customer actually sees. The usual controls are by star rating, by the area within a city, by whether the room can be cancelled, or by a list of properties you have picked yourself. How fine that control can get depends on the information the supplier sends with each hotel, because you can only sort on what actually arrives. There are two common ways to work. One is to leave the full list open and let the customer narrow it down using the filters on your search page, which suits an agency selling a wide spread of destinations. The other is to publish a shorter list you have chosen, which suits an operator who sells a handful of resorts and wants the page to feel curated. You can also mix the two, showing your own selection at the top and the rest of the results below it. It is worth being clear about the trade off. Every hotel you hide is a booking you cannot take, and a customer who cannot find the property they had already read about may simply go elsewhere. Availability also moves all the time, so a very short list can come back empty on a busy weekend while the wider list still has rooms to sell. Start by deciding which destinations you genuinely want to sell, then ask your support contact which filters the suppliers behind those destinations actually support before you spend time building your list.

Question 2

Can I get my bookings out of the system into a spreadsheet for my accountant?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. Most travel agency software lets you take the bookings you see on screen and download them as a spreadsheet file, so your accountant can open them in Excel or a similar program without needing a login to your system. Usually you filter the booking list first, by date range, by supplier, by the staff member who made the sale, or by booking status, and then export only what is showing. The file normally carries the things an accountant asks for, such as the booking reference, the travel date, the customer name, what was sold, the amount owed to the supplier and the amount charged to the customer, so the commission or markup on each line is easy to read. There are limits worth knowing before you rely on it. Exactly which columns you get depends on your plan, and on what the supplier gives back in the first place, so a detail an airline or a hotel never returns cannot appear in the file. A direct link into accounting software is a separate matter again, and whether that is possible depends on the package you are on and on the accounting product you use, so please do not assume it is included. The sensible next step is to run one export for a recent month, show the file to your accountant, and tell us which columns are missing before you build your month end routine around it.

Question 3

Can I hold a flight seat for my customer before they have paid?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases you can, but it depends on the airline and on the fare your customer has chosen. Some airlines allow a booking to sit unpaid until a deadline they set, and the flight booking API passes that deadline back to you along with the reservation. Until it runs out, the seats and the fare are held for your customer. If payment does not reach the airline in time, the reservation cancels itself and the seats go back on sale. This is not offered on every fare. Low cost carriers and many discounted fares expect payment at the moment of booking, and for those the API will simply not return a deadline at all. Even where a hold is allowed, the airline decides how long it lasts, and it can be very short on a busy route or close to the departure date. The API only reports what the airline says, it cannot stretch the hold or argue for more time on your behalf. Where you can use it, a hold is genuinely useful. It suits a family who need to check dates with each other before committing, or a company that has to approve the travel internally before it releases the money. You keep the reservation live in your system, chase the payment, and issue the ticket once the funds are in, without having to search and quote all over again. Before you rely on this, ask your team to always read the deadline the API returns and to set a reminder against it, because once that time passes the fare is gone and the whole trip has to be priced again.

Question 4

Can I offer my customers hotels where they pay at the hotel instead of paying me up front?

Accepted Answer

Often yes, but only on the rates that allow it. A hotel booking API usually returns a mix. Some rooms are prepaid, which means you take the money from your customer at the time of booking and settle with the supplier afterwards. Others are pay at hotel, where your customer pays nothing to you and settles the room bill at the reception desk when they check out. A pay at hotel room still needs a card at the time of booking, because the hotel wants a guarantee before it holds the room. That card is passed through to the hotel to hold rather than charged by you, and the hotel may place a temporary block on it. Whether you get this option at all depends on the supplier you are connected to. Some suppliers sell only prepaid rooms, so you will never see a pay at hotel rate from them, whatever the hotel offers on its own website. It is worth thinking about what this does to your money. When your customer pays the hotel directly, nothing passes through your account, so your commission reaches you later from the supplier instead of being in your hands on the day of the booking. Some agencies prefer prepaid rates for that reason alone, and you can usually choose to show only prepaid rooms if you would rather keep it simple. Ask your supplier which of their rates can be paid at the hotel, then check how the payment type appears on your search results so your customer knows exactly what they are paying now and what they are paying later.

Question 5

Can I book a flight for a baby or a young child through a flight booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can book babies and children through a flight booking API, as long as you send their real dates of birth with the booking. Airlines price young travellers differently from adults. A baby who sits on a parent's lap is treated as an infant and pays only a small share of the adult fare, while an older child usually gets a seat of their own at a child fare when the airline offers one. The API works out which of the two applies from the date of birth you enter, so getting that date right matters more than it might seem. If it is wrong or left out, the search can come back with a full adult fare, or with no fare at all. Some rules come from the airline rather than from your software. Most airlines allow only one lap infant for each adult travelling, many will not carry a baby under a certain age, and some do not sell child fares on their cheapest tickets, so the child simply pays the adult price. Airlines also have their own way of handling a child who has a birthday during the trip and moves from one age group to the next. Your software passes these rules back to you exactly as the airline gives them, but it cannot bend them. Before you quote a family, put the exact dates of birth into the search and look carefully at what comes back for each traveller, and check the airline's own rules on children flying without an adult if that applies to your booking.

Question 6

Can my travel agency software save my customers passport and visa details so I do not have to ask for them every time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software will let you save a customer's passport and visa details on their profile, so you do not have to ask for the same information every time they travel with you. The details usually sit on the customer record rather than on a single booking, which means the next time you start a booking for that person the system can fill the passenger form for you. Good software will also hold the document number, the issuing country and the expiry date, and it can warn you when a passport is close to running out before a trip. That saves a lot of back and forth by email, and it cuts down on typing mistakes in names and numbers. There are limits worth knowing about. Whether those saved details actually reach the airline or the hotel depends on the supplier and on what their API accepts, and some suppliers still want the document entered at the time of booking rather than taken from a stored profile. Holding passport and visa information also makes you responsible for it under the privacy rules of your own country, so you should keep it behind staff permissions, keep it only while you genuinely need it, and tell your customers that you are storing it. Before you start saving documents for every customer, check what your plan allows, decide who on your team should be able to see this part of the customer record, and make sure your privacy notice says what you keep and for how long.

Question 7

Can a flight booking API put my customer on two different airlines for the same trip?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases, although whether it works depends on the airlines involved and on how your supplier puts the fare together. A flight booking API can combine flights from two different airlines into one trip, and your customer sees a single price and a single confirmation. Behind that, it may be one ticket that both airlines recognise, or it may be two separate tickets that simply sit next to each other. That difference matters more than it sounds. On a single ticket the airlines have an arrangement with each other, so if the first flight runs late the second airline is expected to look after your customer and put them on a later service. On two separate tickets there is no such arrangement, and a missed connection is treated as a flight your customer did not turn up for, which usually means buying a new one. Baggage can behave differently too. On a single ticket the bags are often checked through to the final airport, while on separate tickets your customer may have to collect them, clear immigration and check in again. The API will normally tell you which kind of ticket a result is, and it is worth showing that plainly on your own screens so your staff are not left guessing when a customer asks. Ask your supplier which airline combinations are sold as one ticket on your account, and make sure your booking screens show the connection time so your staff can judge whether it is safe to sell.

Question 8

Can I use my travel agency software on my phone when I am away from the office?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can use your travel agency software on your phone, because it runs in a web browser rather than as a program installed on one office computer. If you can sign in on your laptop, you can sign in the same way on a phone or a tablet, using the same address and the same password, and you will see the same bookings and the same customer records. What changes is the amount of space on the screen. The pages resize so you can read them on a small screen, and the everyday jobs work well that way, such as checking a booking, looking at a customer's details, seeing what came in today, or replying to an enquiry while you are with a client or travelling. Longer jobs are harder on a phone, so a wide screen is still better for building a full itinerary, editing your markup rules, or working through a long report. There are limits worth knowing. Some parts depend on the plan you are on and on what your own administrator has allowed your login to see, so a staff member may not have every screen on their phone that you have on yours. Anything that reaches out to a supplier, such as a live search or a cancellation, still depends on that supplier answering, and a weak mobile signal will make it feel slow even when nothing is actually wrong. Sign in on your own phone and try the two or three tasks you would most likely need to do while you are out, and tell us if any screen feels awkward to use that way.

Question 9

Can I turn off the products I do not want to sell on my white label travel portal, like cruises or car hire?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. A white label travel portal is normally built as a set of separate products, flights, hotels, holiday packages, transfers, car hire, cruises and activities, and each one can be switched on or off for your own site. If you only sell flights and hotels today, the search boxes and menu tabs for everything else simply do not appear, so your customers are never offered something you are not ready to service. Switching a product back on later is usually just a setting, so you can start narrow and add more as your business grows. Many agencies open with one or two products, get comfortable with the booking and payment flow, then bring in the rest once their staff know the system. You can also do the reverse and hide a product for a while if it is causing you too much after sales work. Being honest about the limits, showing a product is not the same as having something to sell in it. Each product needs a live supplier connection behind it, and some suppliers ask you to hold your own account or contract with them before they will release rates to your site. Which products are included may also depend on the plan you are on, so a product that is technically available is not always available to you at no extra cost. The best next step is to write down the products you genuinely sell and make money on today, then ask which of those your current plan and supplier connections already cover, and have everything else hidden before your portal goes live.

Question 10

Can I ask the airline for wheelchair help for my customer when I book through a flight booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can pass a request for wheelchair help or other special assistance to the airline through a flight booking API, but whether the airline acts on it is a separate matter from whether it was sent. Airlines accept these requests using a set of standard codes, one for a passenger who needs a wheelchair to the aircraft door, another for one who cannot walk at all, and others for things like a passenger travelling with a guide dog or one who needs help because of poor sight or hearing. When your booking system supports this, your staff pick the right option while making the booking and the request goes onto the reservation along with the passenger name. Some requests, such as help for an unaccompanied child or carriage of medical equipment, are handled outside the normal booking flow because the airline wants to check them by hand first. The honest limit is that a request is only a request. The airline usually accepts it as pending and confirms it later, and a few carriers, especially low cost ones, want the passenger or the agent to arrange assistance directly with them or at the airport instead. So the answer can also change from one airline to another within the same trip. When you take a booking like this, send the request at the time of booking rather than afterwards, tell your customer it is pending until the airline confirms, and ask your supplier which of the assistance codes your content actually supports.