Question 1

Can I book a hotel room for tonight through a hotel booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can book a room for the same night through a hotel booking API. Same day availability is a normal part of hotel distribution, and the search will simply return the properties that still have rooms open for that night. The list your customer sees will usually be shorter than for a stay further ahead, because many properties are already full by then or have closed their online sales for the day. The part worth understanding is that every supplier sets its own cut off time for same day arrivals. Some keep selling until late in the evening, some stop in the afternoon, and some pass the booking to the hotel to confirm instead of confirming it straight away. That is decided by the supplier and by the individual property, not by your portal, so the only reliable guide is what comes back in the live search at the moment your customer is actually looking. Last minute rooms also tend to be non refundable, or to carry very tight cancellation rules, so it is worth showing those rules plainly on the booking page before your customer pays. Confirmation matters more than usual here too, because your customer may be walking up to the front desk within hours of paying, and you want the hotel reference in their hands before they travel. If selling last minute stays is important to you, run a few test searches for tonight at different times of the day in the destinations you sell most, and ask your supplier what their cut off time and confirmation behaviour is for same day arrivals.

Question 2

Can my customers pay part of the cost now and the rest later on my white label travel portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label travel portal can be set up to take a part payment now and collect the balance later, but whether you can offer it on a particular booking depends on the supplier behind that booking rather than on the portal. The way it normally works is that the portal takes an agreed share of the total at the time of booking, records the booking as part paid, and stores the balance with a due date. Your customer gets a confirmation that shows what has been paid and what is still owing. When the balance falls due you can send them a payment link, or your staff can take the money in the office and mark it received, and the booking then shows as fully paid in your reports. This suits holiday packages, tours and hotel stays that you are holding on your own terms, because you control when the money has to reach the supplier. Where it becomes harder is with airline tickets and prepaid hotel rates. In most cases the ticket is issued straight away and the airline or the consolidator wants the full fare at that moment, so there is nothing left for you to collect later unless you carry the balance yourself. The same is true of many hotel rates that are charged at the time of booking. Your payment gateway also has to allow a second charge or a follow up link, and on some plans part payment is an option that has to be switched on before it appears at checkout. Decide which of your products you actually want to sell this way, then check with the supplier for those products and with your payment provider that a later collection is allowed, and make sure your own terms on the portal state clearly when the balance must be paid before travel.

Question 3

Can my travel agency software show me how much profit I made on each booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software keeps a record of what you sold and what it cost you, so you can see the profit on a booking and not only the amount your customer paid. When a booking is saved, the system stores the supplier cost, the markup or commission you added, and any fees or discounts you applied, and the difference between those is your margin on that booking. From there you can usually group the information the way you need it. A report by date range shows how one month compared with the month before, a report by staff member shows who is bringing in the business, and a report by product shows whether flights, hotels or packages are earning you the most. Most systems also let you export the report to a spreadsheet if your accountant prefers to work with it separately. It is worth being honest about the limits. The numbers are only as good as the costs that go into them, so if a booking was arranged outside the system and typed in by hand, or if a supplier invoices you later at a different rate, the report will not match your bank statement on its own. Refunds, airline penalties and card charges often arrive weeks after travel, so a month is rarely final until those have settled. How detailed the reports are, and how far back the data goes, can also depend on your plan. Before you start relying on it, run the profit report for a month you already know well and compare it with your own records, and ask what happens to those figures when a booking is later changed, refunded or cancelled.

Question 4

Can I run a discount code or a special offer on my white label travel portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can run a discount code on your white label travel portal. You create the code, decide what it applies to and how long it lasts, and your customer types it in before paying, so the amount comes down before the payment is taken. A code like this is your own offer, not something the airline or the hotel is giving away, so you stay in control of when it starts and when it stops. The part worth understanding is where the money for that discount comes from. The fare or the room rate that arrives from the supplier is the amount you have to pay them, so anything you take off comes out of your own commission or markup rather than out of the supplier's side. That means you can only discount as far as your own margin allows. Some suppliers also do not permit their rate to be shown lower than it came in, so on those it is safer to apply the reduction at the payment step rather than change the price on the results page. Most owners put sensible limits on a code, such as which service it works on, the dates it runs between, and whether one customer can use it once or as often as they like. How many of those controls you have depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up, so it is worth checking what is available to you rather than assuming. Before you send a code out to your customers, make one small test code and put a real booking through with it, so you can see the reduced amount on the confirmation and be sure it has not taken more of your margin than you meant it to.

Question 5

If my customer cancels a flight, will the booking API tell me how much money they get back?

Accepted Answer

In most cases yes, though not always straight away. When a fare allows cancellation, a flight booking API can show you the airline's rules for that ticket, and for many airlines it can also work out what is due back to your customer once the airline's own charge has been taken off. How dependable that amount is depends on the airline. Some airlines return a proper refund quote through the API, which you can show your customer before you cancel anything. Others only give you the fare conditions in words, and the exact amount is confirmed by the airline after the cancellation has been filed, which can take some time to come back and settle into your account. It helps to remember that cancelling and refunding are two separate steps. Cancelling stops your customer travelling, the refund follows after that, and any service fee of your own is yours to decide and is not part of what the airline sends back. Even on a fare sold as non refundable, some taxes are often still returnable, so it is worth checking the rules rather than telling your customer that nothing is due. Before you cancel anything, pull the fare rules for that booking through the API, and where the airline supports it ask for a refund quote first, so that the figure you give your customer matches what the airline is actually going to pay.

Question 6

How quickly will a hotel booking API bring back search results for my customers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most hotel searches come back within a few seconds, but the exact time depends on the supplier behind the API and on how wide the search is. A search for one named hotel on fixed dates is quick. A search across a whole city, with many room types and several guests, has far more to look at, so it will take longer. The reason for the wait is that the API has to ask the supplier for live prices and availability at the moment your customer searches. Those prices are not held in advance, because they change through the day and a stale price would fail at booking. If a supplier is slow to answer, your search is slow too, and nothing at our end can make their system reply faster. There are sensible ways to keep the wait comfortable. Results can be shown as they arrive instead of all at once, so your customer sees the first hotels while the rest are still coming in. A search can also be narrowed to a smaller area or to fewer suppliers. Repeat searches for the same city and dates can be answered from a short lived copy of the last result, which is quicker, though a few of those rooms may need checking again before the booking goes through. If searches feel slow on your portal, note the city, the dates and the time of day, and check whether it happens with every supplier or only one. That tells you whether it is the search settings on your side or the supplier's own system, and the answer is different for each.

Question 7

Can I add my own pages, like destination guides or a blog, to my white label travel portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can add your own pages to a white label travel portal, such as a page about your company, destination guides, visa advice or a simple blog. These pages sit alongside the search and booking part of the site and use the same header, footer and colours, so a visitor never feels that they have left your website. The pages are usually managed from your own admin area, where you write the text, add photographs and choose where the page appears in the menu. You do not need to know anything technical to do this, although somebody in your team does have to write the words. If you want a page with an unusual layout, something beyond a normal page of text and images, that may need help from our side and can depend on your plan. Adding this kind of content is worth the effort for more than just appearance. A search engine has very little to read on a page that is only a search box, so honest writing about the places you sell gives it something to index, and it gives your customers a reason to trust you before they book anything. A good place to start is to list the destinations you sell most often, write a short and genuine page for each one, and link those pages from your home page so that both visitors and search engines can find them.

Question 8

Can a flight booking API show me flights from low cost airlines as well as the regular ones?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases, but it depends on which suppliers your API is connected to. Traditional airlines usually come through the global systems agents have used for years, while low cost carriers are added separately, either straight from the airline or through an aggregator that gathers several of them in one place. So low cost content is available, but it is not automatic, and it has to be switched on for your account. When it is switched on, those flights appear in your search results alongside the others, so your customer sees one list and picks whatever suits them. Behind the scenes they do not all behave the same way. Many low cost airlines sell a bare fare and charge separately for baggage, seats and meals, so those extras come back as options you add during booking rather than being part of the fare. Several of them also take payment at once with no option to hold, and their change and cancellation rules are usually stricter. There are real limits worth knowing before you plan around it. Not every low cost airline is reachable through every supplier, and coverage varies a lot by region, so an airline that matters in your market may or may not be included. Putting a low cost flight and a traditional airline on one ticket is often not possible, and it would instead be two separate bookings that you look after side by side. Changes after the sale, such as a new date, sometimes have to be handled with the airline directly. The useful next step is to write down the low cost airlines your customers ask for most often, then we can check which of them your supplier setup already covers and what adding the others would involve.

Question 9

Can I add a booking I arranged outside the system, like a visa or a private car, into my travel agency software?

Accepted Answer

Yes, nearly all travel agency software lets you record a booking you arranged outside the system. It is usually called a manual or offline booking, and it exists for the things no API sells, such as a visa, a private car, a local guide, or a hotel you booked directly with the owner. You enter the same details you would see on an automatic booking. The traveller name, the travel dates, the supplier you used, what the service is, what it cost you and what you are charging, and any note your staff should see. Most systems also let you attach the supplier voucher, so the whole trip sits in one place. Once it is saved it behaves like any other booking, so your invoices, your customer file and your sales reports include it. The honest limit is that a manual booking has no live connection to the supplier. Nothing confirms it for you, nothing cancels automatically, and if the supplier changes the time or the room, your software will not know until a person updates it. It is a record of what you agreed, not a live reservation. How many fields you get, and whether you can attach files, also depends on your plan. Open a test booking on your own system, look for the option to add a service manually, and check that it then appears on the customer invoice and in your sales report. If it does not, ask your account contact whether manual bookings are switched on for you.

Question 10

Can I let other travel agents sell through my white label travel portal and see what each of them sells?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can open your portal to other travel agents and see exactly what each of them sells. This is usually called agent or sub agent access, and it means you give another agency a login to the same portal you already use, but with their own view of it. They search and book in the normal way, and every booking they make is recorded against their name, so your reports show you who sold what and when. How much freedom you give them is up to you. You can normally set a separate markup for each agent, or one markup for a whole group of agents, so a partner who sends you a lot of business can be given better rates than someone who has just joined. You can also limit what they are allowed to do, for example letting them book but not cancel, or hiding certain suppliers from them completely. Payment is the part worth thinking about early. Some agencies ask their sub agents to pay by card at the time of booking, and others give them a credit balance or a deposit account that goes down with each booking and has to be topped up again. Whether a particular payment method is available to you depends on your payment provider and the plan you are on, so it is worth confirming that before you promise anything to a partner. Before you invite anyone in, decide what markup each agent should get, what they should and should not be allowed to do, and how they will pay you, then set up one test agent login and make a booking through it yourself so you can see the whole flow from their side.