Question 1

Will a flight booking API tell me how much baggage is included in the fare before my customer books?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases a flight booking API can show the baggage allowance for each fare before your customer books. Airlines now sell the same route at several different fares, and the cheapest one often includes only a small cabin bag, so the allowance is normally sent back with the price and you can display it next to each option in your search results. How much detail you get depends on the airline and on the source the fare comes from. Some carriers return a clear allowance for every fare, such as the number of pieces or the weight allowed for the checked bag and the cabin bag. Others send only a short code or a line of text that has to be shown exactly as it arrives. Low cost carriers in particular sometimes give nothing at the search stage and reveal the allowance only once a fare is selected, because for them the bag is a paid extra rather than part of the ticket. Because of that, it is safer to treat the allowance as information that comes from the airline rather than something that can be promised for every flight on every route. Where the airline sends it, your portal can show it. Where it does not, your portal shows what is available and your customer sees the full baggage position on the airline confirmation. Before you go live, run a few searches on the routes you sell most often and look at what the allowance shows for the cheapest fare, the middle fare and the flexible fare, then decide how you want that wording to appear on your search page so that your customers are not surprised at the airport.

Question 2

Will a hotel booking API tell me if breakfast is included in the room price?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases a hotel booking API will tell you whether breakfast is included in the price of a room. Hotels send the meal arrangement along with each room they offer, and it usually arrives as a short description such as room only, breakfast included, half board or full board. Your portal can show that wording next to the room, so your customer can see what they are paying for before they book. How clearly this appears depends on the supplier the room comes from. Some suppliers send a tidy code that your portal can turn into the same simple line of text every time. Others put the detail inside the free text of the room name or the rate description, and then the wording can change from one hotel to the next. Because of that, your customer may sometimes read the hotel's own phrasing rather than a neat standard phrase, and a few room types may not mention meals at all. It is also worth knowing that breakfast being included is not the same as everything being paid for in advance. In many places a city tax or a service charge is still collected at the property, and that is separate from the meal arrangement. When a room says breakfast is included, that refers to the meal only, not to every possible cost at the hotel. Before you go live, run a few searches in the cities you sell most often and check how the meal information reads on your own pages, and tell us if any of the wording looks likely to confuse your customers.

Question 3

Can my travel agency software send booking updates to my customers by text message or WhatsApp?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it can, although the messages themselves go out through a separate messaging provider rather than from the travel software on its own. The software knows when something has happened to a booking, so it can pass that moment on to the messaging service and have a short note delivered to the customer's phone. The events that usually make sense are the ones your customers already ask about. A confirmation once the booking is held, a note when the ticket or voucher is issued, a receipt when a payment goes through, a warning if the airline moves the flight, and a confirmation if the booking is cancelled. These are the same moments that trigger your emails, so nothing new has to be invented. There are limits worth knowing before you promise it. WhatsApp business messaging needs an approved sender account, and the wording of anything you send first has to be approved in advance as a template, so you cannot write freely outside the window when a customer has replied to you. Text messages need a registered sender name in many countries, and some countries have their own rules about that. The cost of each message sits with the messaging provider and varies by country, and you also need the customer's agreement to be contacted this way. If this matters to you, check whether messaging is included in your current plan or needs a separate account, decide which few booking events really deserve a message, and start the sender approval early, because that part often takes longer than the setup itself.

Question 4

Can I add my customer's frequent flyer number to a booking made through a flight booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. The loyalty number is sent to the airline together with the passenger details at the time of booking, so it sits on the ticket from the start and your customer does not have to go back and add it later. Whether it actually works depends on the airline. Full service airlines that belong to a large alliance usually accept a number from a partner airline as well as their own, so a customer can often earn miles on a flight operated by another member of the same group. Many low cost carriers have no programme at all, or accept the number only on their own website. The booking request will normally carry the field either way, but it is the airline that decides whether it is honoured. It is also worth being honest with your customer that adding the number does not guarantee the miles. Airlines award miles according to the fare that was bought, and the cheapest fares sometimes earn very little or nothing. The number also has to match the passenger name as it is held in the loyalty account, otherwise the airline will simply ignore it without telling anyone. Before you promise anything, check with your supplier or your account team which airlines in your content accept a loyalty number through the booking flow, and tell your customer to keep the booking reference so they can claim any missing miles directly with the airline afterwards.

Question 5

Can I send my customer's special requests, such as a late arrival or a quiet room, to the hotel through a hotel booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most hotel booking APIs let you send a special request along with the booking, but it helps to understand what that request can and cannot do. When your customer books, there is usually a field where you can pass a short note to the hotel, such as a preference for a quiet room, a double bed instead of twin beds, a non smoking room, or a warning that the guest will arrive late in the evening. That note travels with the reservation and shows up on the hotel's arrivals list next to the guest name. Some suppliers accept free text, while others only accept a fixed set of options that you choose from, so what you are able to send depends on the supplier sitting behind the API rather than on your portal. The honest part is that a special request is a request, not a promise. The hotel decides at check in whether it can be met, and that depends on what is free on the day. Nothing is confirmed in advance, so it is safer not to tell your customer that a room type, a floor or an arrival time is guaranteed. Requests that carry a cost, such as an extra bed, early check in or connecting rooms, are normally arranged and paid for at the hotel itself, so they sit outside what the booking covers. If a request really matters to your customer, ask your supplier which requests they pass on and in what form, keep the note short and in plain English so nothing is lost, and contact the hotel directly closer to the arrival date to confirm.

Question 6

Can my travel agency software show me the customers who started a booking but never finished it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most travel agency software keeps a record of bookings that were started and never completed, and it is one of the more useful screens you will look at. When a customer runs a search, picks a flight or a hotel and then reaches the payment step without paying, the system has usually stored enough of the trip to hold on to it. That record sits in its own list, often called incomplete or abandoned bookings, with the travel dates, the route or the hotel name, and whatever contact details the customer had typed in before they stopped. How much you actually get depends on how far the customer went. If they left at the first search screen, there is often nothing to work with beyond a date and a destination, because they had not given you a name or an email yet. If they reached the passenger or guest details step, you normally have a name and an email address and can follow up properly. Anything the customer never typed in cannot appear afterwards, so the further along they went, the more useful that record is to you. It is worth remembering that a saved incomplete booking is not a held seat or a held room. The price and the availability still come from the supplier, so by the time you ring the customer back the fare may have changed or the room may be gone. You will usually need to run the search again to see what can be booked now, and the software will treat that as a fresh booking rather than carrying on with the old one. Have a look in the bookings area of your portal for a list of incomplete or pending items, and ask your provider whether follow up emails can go out automatically or whether your staff need to contact those customers themselves.

Question 7

Can a flight booking API handle a trip where my customer visits several cities before flying home?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most flight booking APIs can handle multi city trips, where a customer flies from one city to another, then on to a third, and home from there. Your search form needs to allow more than two rows of travel so each leg can be entered with its own date, and the results come back as one itinerary priced together rather than as separate tickets. There are limits worth knowing about. Airlines and suppliers usually cap how many legs a single booking can hold, and some content sources only support simple return and one way searches, so the multi city option may be missing or may bring back far fewer results. Fares for these trips are built from special rules, so a route that looks perfectly sensible to you can come back empty simply because no airline offers a through fare for that combination of cities. When a genuine multi city fare is not available, the usual answer is to sell the trip as separate tickets, one for each leg. That works, but your staff and your customer should both understand that separate tickets are treated separately by the airlines. A delay on the first leg does not protect the next one, and any change or refund applies to one ticket at a time rather than to the whole journey. Before you advertise this kind of trip, run a few real searches on the routes your customers ask for most and check that your supplier returns priced results for them, then decide how your portal should offer separate tickets when it does not.

Question 8

Can my white label travel portal be shown in more than one language for customers in different countries?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label travel portal can be shown in more than one language, and your customers can normally pick the language they want from a menu on the site. The parts that belong to your portal, such as the search boxes, the buttons, the wording on the booking steps and the confirmation emails, sit as text in your own setup, so they can be prepared in whichever languages you sell in. Once a language has been added, a customer who lands on your site can switch to it and stay in it all the way through to payment. The part that is harder to promise is the supplier content. Hotel names, room descriptions, fare rules and airline conditions reach your portal from the supplier or the API, and they arrive in whatever languages that supplier chooses to send. Many suppliers send English only, some send a small number of major languages, and the coverage can differ from one hotel chain or airline to the next. Where a translation has not been sent, that text will appear in the language the supplier gave, even though the rest of the page is in the language your customer picked. It is also worth remembering that adding a language is a commitment as well as a setting, because your terms, your emails and the replies your staff send should all match it. Before you decide, write down the languages your customers actually book in, then ask which of those your suppliers can supply content in, so you know in advance which pages will read fully in that language and which will be a mix.

Question 9

Can I add my own commission on top of the hotel prices that come from a hotel booking API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can add your own commission on top of the prices that come from a hotel booking API. The supplier sends your system a net rate, which is the amount you owe them for the room, and your portal decides what the customer actually sees on the search results. The difference between those two amounts is your margin, and it stays with you when the booking is paid. How you set that margin is usually your decision. Most travel agency systems let you apply a markup as a percentage or as a fixed amount, and let you vary it by supplier, by country, by star rating or by an individual property, so you can be sharper on the hotels you sell most often. Many setups also let you give one markup to your walk in customers and a different one to agents or corporate accounts logging in to your portal. There are limits worth knowing about before you plan around this. A few suppliers and a few hotel chains work on a fixed selling rate and do not allow you to change what the guest is shown, and some agreements set a ceiling on how much you may add. Whether local taxes and hotel fees sit inside or outside your markup also depends on the supplier and on the rules of the country you are selling into, so the same percentage will not always behave the same way on every booking. The sensible next step is to ask whoever supplies your hotel content what their rules on markup are, then set a modest default in your system and run a few test searches so you can see the customer facing price for yourself before you go live.

Question 10

Can I correct a spelling mistake in a passenger's name after the flight has been booked?

Accepted Answer

Yes, often, but not always, and it depends on the airline. A small correction, such as one or two letters in a first name, is usually allowed if you ask soon after booking. Changing the ticket to a different person is not allowed at all, because the ticket belongs to the named passenger. Some airlines accept a genuine spelling fix at no cost within a short window after ticketing, some treat it as a name change and charge for it, and a few will only cancel the ticket and let you book again. Whether your portal can do it on its own is a separate matter. Very few flight booking APIs allow a passenger name to be edited once the ticket has been issued. In most setups your staff raise the correction with the supplier or the airline using the booking reference, and the booking in your portal is updated after the airline confirms the change. So plan for this as something your team handles, not something the customer clicks. The safest approach is to stop the mistake happening in the first place. Ask customers to enter the name exactly as printed on the passport, show a clear reminder at the passenger details step, and have your staff read names back before ticketing when they take a booking over the phone. The name on the ticket is what the airport will check against the travel document. If you already have a booking with the wrong name, contact your supplier straight away rather than waiting, because the options usually get fewer and more expensive the closer it gets to departure.