Question 1

How will I know that the hotel has actually received my customer's booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a hotel booking API does tell you when the hotel has the booking, and it does that by sending back a confirmation reference as soon as the reservation goes through. For most rates this happens within seconds of your customer paying, and the reply carries a supplier reference and, in many cases, the hotel's own reference too. Your portal stores both of those and prints them on the voucher your customer receives, so there is something concrete to quote at the front desk. Not every rate is instant, though. Some hotels and some suppliers work on request, which means the booking sits as pending until the hotel itself accepts it, and that can take a few hours or occasionally longer. In that situation the API gives you a pending status first and the confirmation afterwards. Your portal should show that state honestly to the customer rather than telling them they are booked when the hotel has not yet said yes. It also helps to know that the supplier reference and the hotel's own reference are not always the same thing, and whether you receive the hotel reference at all depends on the supplier and on how that particular property reports back. Where it is not passed on, the voucher together with the supplier reference is normally enough for the hotel to find the guest on arrival. If you are not sure how your own bookings behave, make a test booking on a rate you can cancel free of charge, then look carefully at what the confirmation screen and the voucher actually show you, and ask your supplier which of their rates are on request rather than instant.

Question 2

Is my customers' card information safe when they pay on my white label travel portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, card details are kept away from your portal in normal online payments, but how well they are protected depends on the payment gateway you connect and how your own office works. When a customer reaches the payment step, the card form is usually served by the payment gateway rather than by your own website. The card number travels straight to the gateway, and your portal gets back only an approval and a reference number. Because of that, neither you nor your staff ever see or keep the full card number, which is what card industry rules expect of a travel business. Some gateways also let a returning customer save a card for next time. The card itself stays with the gateway and your portal holds only a token, which is a harmless stand in for the real number. A member of your staff looking at the booking screen still cannot read it. Whether saved cards are offered at all, and whether refunds can be pushed back to the saved card, depends on the gateway and on the plan you have with them, so please do not assume it is included. The weaker point is usually the bookings that do not go through the gateway, such as a card read out over the phone, or card details written into an email or a chat message. Those sit outside anything the portal can protect, so you need your own rule that nobody writes a card number down. Ask your payment provider for their security and compliance paperwork, and agree with your team how phone bookings will be taken before you start selling.

Question 3

Can my travel agency software show prices to customers in more than one currency?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it can, but how far it goes depends on your suppliers and your payment provider rather than on the software on its own. The way it usually works is that each supplier returns its prices in the currency it trades in, and your portal converts that into the currency your customer has chosen, using an exchange rate that you or your provider keep up to date. The customer then browses, compares and books in a currency they understand, which makes a big difference to how many people finish a booking rather than leaving halfway through. You can normally decide which currencies to offer, and you can add a small allowance to the rate so that day to day movement in the market does not eat into your margin. Where it gets less simple is the money itself. The currency shown on screen and the currency the card is actually charged in are not always the same, because your payment provider has to support that currency, and some suppliers will only settle with you in their own currency. That also affects refunds, since a cancellation may come back at a slightly different converted value than the customer originally paid. None of this is a fault in the software, it is simply how cross currency selling works, and it is better to know it up front than to explain it to a customer later. The sensible next step is to ask your payment provider which currencies they can actually charge and refund in, then match that list against the currencies your suppliers quote in, and offer only the ones that line up on both sides.

Question 4

Will a hotel booking API tell me about extra charges my customer has to pay at the hotel itself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases, although how much detail you get depends on the supplier sitting behind the booking. Plenty of hotels charge things that are not part of the room rate, such as a city or tourist tax, a resort fee, a cleaning charge or parking. A hotel booking API will usually pass these through as separate items alongside the room rate, and it will normally say whether each one is taken at the time of booking or paid straight to the property at check in. When the supplier sends that detail through, your portal can show it on the room result and again on the checkout page, so your customer sees the whole picture before they pay rather than getting a surprise at the front desk. There is a limit worth knowing about. Not every supplier sends this information for every property, and some send it only as a line of plain text rather than as a proper amount your portal can add up. Where nothing usable comes through, your portal shows the wording exactly as the hotel wrote it and make clear that local charges may apply on arrival. That is why two hotels on the same results page can look quite different, one with a tidy breakdown of charges and the other with only a short note. Go through a few properties on your own portal, in different countries, and compare what your checkout page shows against what the hotel publishes on its own site. If the detail looks thin for a supplier you sell a lot of, raise it with your account contact, because it is often a matter of switching on the fuller rate detail on that connection rather than changing anything on your website.

Question 5

Can my customers create an account on my portal and see their past bookings?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label travel portal can let your customers register an account, sign in later, and look back at what they have booked with you. The account normally holds their contact details, their traveller names, and a list of their bookings with the reference number and the current status of each one. It saves your staff a great deal of time, because a customer who can find their own booking reference does not need to phone you to ask for it. How much a customer can do from that account varies. Seeing past and upcoming bookings, downloading a voucher or a ticket copy, and updating their own contact details are the common ones. Anything that changes the booking itself, such as a date change or a cancellation, depends on the supplier rules behind that product, so some bookings will offer the customer a self service option and others will only offer a request that comes through to your team. It is worth remembering that an account holds personal travel information, so treat it seriously. Ask customers for a proper password, avoid storing anything on the account that you do not actually need, and make sure your staff understand who in your agency is allowed to open a customer record and why. If this matters to you, sign up as a test customer yourself, make a small booking, then sign back in and check that the booking appears with the details and documents you would want a real customer to find there.

Question 6

Can my customers check in for their flight through my portal?

Accepted Answer

No, in most cases your customers cannot check in for their flight through your portal, because check in stays with the airline and opens on the airline's own website or app, usually a day or two before departure. What your portal can do is make that step easy for them. Once the ticket has been issued, the confirmation your customer receives carries the airline booking reference and the ticket number, and that is all they need to find the booking on the airline site. Many agencies also add a short line on the confirmation telling the customer where to go to check in, so nobody is left guessing on the day. There are good reasons this is unlikely to change soon. Airlines ask for passport details, run visa and document checks, and sometimes need the passenger to accept their conditions at check in, and they want all of that done on their own system where it is verified against their own records. A few suppliers do offer a check in or boarding pass feature for a small number of airlines, so it is fair to ask what is available on your plan rather than assuming it is all or nothing. The practical step is to decide how you want to remind your customers to check in, either in the booking confirmation or as a separate message closer to the travel date, and to make sure the airline booking reference appears clearly on everything you send them.

Question 7

Can I control what each of my staff members can see and do in my travel agency software?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. Travel agency software normally gives every member of your team their own login, and you decide what each login is allowed to see and do. A junior counter staff member can be set up to search and book, while only a senior person or the owner can approve a refund, change a markup or open the accounts section. The usual controls cover things like who can cancel a booking, who can see the net cost from the supplier as opposed to the selling price shown to the customer, who can edit customer records, and who can open the sales reports. Many systems also keep a simple record of which login made or changed a booking, so if something looks wrong later you can see who did it and when. How far this can be split up honestly depends on the software and the plan you are on. Some setups let you create your own roles and tick permissions one by one, while others give you a fixed set of roles such as agent, manager and admin that you assign people to. Anything that happens on the supplier side, such as whether a ticket can be voided at all, still follows the supplier rules no matter what permission you give the staff member. Before you set your team up, write down who in your office should be allowed to refund, to see cost prices and to change markups, then ask whether those permissions are fixed roles or something you can build yourself, and make a habit of removing a login the day someone leaves.

Question 8

Will the booking confirmation emails my customers get come from my own company name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the booking confirmations your customers receive can carry your own company name and logo rather than anyone else's. A white label portal is meant to feel like your brand from the first search through to the message that lands in the traveller's inbox. You supply your logo, your trading name and the contact details you want customers to use, and those are placed into the templates the portal sends. Sending from your own web address usually needs a small setup step on your side, because mail providers want proof that you have allowed the portal to send on your behalf. That is a one time change to your domain settings, and until it is done the message still goes out, it simply carries a generic sender while your branding stays visible inside the email. Whoever looks after your website can normally sort this out, and it is worth doing, as properly authorised mail is much less likely to land in a spam folder. There are limits worth knowing. Parts of a confirmation come straight from the airline or the hotel supplier, such as the ticket reference and the fare rules, and those are passed on as the supplier words them. If an airline also sends its own message to the traveller, that one is outside your control. How much of the wording and layout you can edit yourself depends on your plan. Before you go live, ask to see a sample of every email the portal sends, and check with whoever manages your web address that you can add the sending records the setup needs.

Question 9

Can my customers buy extra baggage for their flight after they have already booked?

Accepted Answer

Yes, with some airlines, but not with all of them. Adding a bag after the booking is already made depends far more on the airline holding the ticket than on your portal. Low cost airlines usually make this easy, because extra bags are a large part of how they earn, and many of them allow a bag to be added right up to the day of travel. Full service airlines are more mixed, and some of them only allow it on their own website or at the airport counter. Where it is supported, your staff open the booking on the portal, add the bag, take the payment from the customer, and the airline updates the ticket. Where it is not supported, the booking itself is not affected and the customer can still add the bag directly with the airline, usually during check in, although the price at the airport is normally higher than the price paid online in advance. It also depends on the supplier behind that fare and on your plan, because not every supplier passes these later sales through, even when the airline itself allows them. If your portal does not show an option to add a bag on a particular booking, that usually means the supplier for that fare does not support it rather than the airline refusing the request. Open one of your recent bookings on the portal and see whether an option to add baggage appears, and agree with your staff how they should handle these requests so that nobody promises a customer something the airline will not honour.

Question 10

Will a hotel booking API show the cancellation rules before my customer books?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a hotel booking API can show the cancellation rules for a room before your customer confirms the booking. These rules may explain whether the room can be cancelled, when a cancellation charge starts, and whether the full booking amount could be kept. This helps the customer understand the conditions before agreeing to pay. The details come from the hotel supplier, so the wording and level of detail can vary. Some suppliers provide a clear cancellation deadline, while others return longer conditions that need to be displayed carefully. The rules may also use the local time at the hotel, which can affect whether a cancellation is treated as early or late. A refundable room and a non refundable room at the same hotel can have different conditions. Cancellation terms can sometimes change when availability is checked again or when the booking is confirmed. The portal should therefore show the latest rules during checkout and save the confirmed terms with the booking record. The API can pass on the information it receives, but glideFares cannot guarantee that every supplier presents it in the same format. Before taking bookings, check which cancellation details your chosen hotel suppliers provide and make sure the final terms are easy for your customers and staff to read.