Question 1

Can I sell airport transfers or sightseeing tours on my portal as well as flights and hotels?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can. A white label travel portal is not limited to flights and hotels, and transfers and sightseeing can sit alongside them as their own search and booking sections, so a customer who has just booked a room can add a car from the airport or a day tour without leaving your site. How much choice you get depends on what you are connected to. If you have a supplier account for transfers or activities, that content flows into your portal the same way flight and hotel content does, with live prices and availability. If you do not have one yet, you can still load your own products by hand, which is what many agencies do for the tours they run themselves or buy from a local operator, and you decide the description, the price and the timings. There are honest limits worth knowing. Coverage for transfers and tours is thinner than it is for hotels, so a busy city will have plenty to show while a smaller town may have very little. The cancellation rules come from whoever supplies the product, not from you, and some tours are sold on request, which means a person confirms the booking rather than it being instant. Whether these sections are switched on for you can also depend on your plan. The useful thing to check next is whether you already have, or can open, a supplier account covering the destinations you sell most, and then decide which tours you would rather contract and load yourself.

Question 2

Can I see a report of what my agency has sold on my portal each month?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. Travel agency software normally includes a reporting section where you choose a period, such as a week, a month or a full year, and see every booking made through your portal in that time. You can usually see how many bookings were made, which of them were flights and which were hotels, which are still live and which were cancelled, and what your own markup earned you on each one. Most reports can be filtered so you are only looking at the part of the business you care about. You can often narrow the list down to one member of staff, one supplier, one destination or one payment method, and then export what you see as a spreadsheet so your accountant can work with it. That export is usually the easiest way to check a month against what has actually arrived in your bank account. There are limits worth knowing about. A report can only show what passed through your portal, so a booking your staff made directly with an airline or a hotel outside the system will not appear there unless someone enters it by hand. Refunds and supplier commission often settle days or weeks after the travel has happened, so a report run too early can look weaker than the real result. How far back your history goes, and how detailed the reports are, can also depend on your plan. While you are getting set up, ask to be shown the reporting screen with sample bookings in it, and check that it holds the exact fields your accounts need before you start selling.

Question 3

Can my customers book a flight and hotel together on my white label travel portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label travel portal can let customers search for a flight and a hotel during the same visit. This can make the booking process easier because the customer does not need to leave your branded website to arrange the main parts of the trip. The exact experience depends on your portal plan and the suppliers connected to it. In some setups, the flight and hotel are selected together but confirmed as separate bookings. This means each part may have its own payment terms, cancellation rules, confirmation details and travel documents. A combined package with one total and one set of terms may require a different setup and may not be available with every supplier. Availability can also differ by destination and travel date. A flight may still be available when a suitable hotel is not, or the hotel rate may change before confirmation. Your portal should show the important conditions for each selection before the customer pays, but the information displayed depends on what the relevant supplier provides through its connection. Before offering flight and hotel bookings together, check whether your glideFares plan supports the journey you want and confirm how payments, cancellations, documents and customer support will be handled for each part.

Question 4

Can customers ask for a certain bed type when they book a hotel through my website?

Accepted Answer

Yes, customers can often choose or request a bed type when booking a hotel through a website connected to a hotel booking API. The available choices may include options such as one large bed or separate beds, but the exact wording and selection come from the hotel supplier. A bed type shown as part of the room name is usually more reliable than a preference entered as a special request. Some suppliers allow the request to be sent with the booking, but the hotel may treat it as a preference rather than a guarantee. The final arrangement can depend on room availability, hotel policy and what the supplier confirms. Your website should make the difference clear before payment, so the customer understands whether the bed type is confirmed or only requested. Staff should also be able to review the booking details and voucher to see what was accepted. If the customer has an essential requirement, such as separate beds, it may be sensible to confirm it with the hotel after booking. Ask glideFares which bed type details and special request options are supported by your chosen hotel suppliers, then check how confirmed and requested preferences will appear to customers.

Question 5

Can a flight booking API let my customers book a journey that visits more than one city?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a flight booking API can let your customers search for and book a journey that includes more than one city. This is often called a multi city journey, and it can be useful for business trips, long holidays and travellers who want to visit several places before returning home. The exact options depend on the flight supplier and the airlines included in your connection. Some suppliers can return the whole journey as one booking, while others may only offer certain routes or may combine separate flights. The fare rules, baggage allowance and change or cancellation conditions can also be different for each part of the journey, so these details should be shown clearly before the customer confirms. A multi city search usually asks the customer to choose each departure city, destination and travel date in the order they plan to travel. Not every route will be available, and a journey shown in a normal one way search may not be offered as part of one complete booking. Availability and the final fare should always be checked again before payment because airline results can change. Ask glideFares whether multi city search is supported by the flight suppliers available on your plan, and check how separate flights, baggage details and fare rules will appear to your staff and customers.

Question 6

Can my white label travel portal let customers search and book in their preferred language?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your white label travel portal can be set up to show customer facing pages in more than one language. This can include common parts of the booking journey, such as search forms, filters, buttons, traveller details, payment instructions and confirmation pages. The exact languages available depend on your plan and how the portal has been configured. Some travel content comes directly from the supplier, including hotel descriptions, room names, fare conditions, baggage information and cancellation rules. That content may not be available in every language, so a customer could see most of the portal in their chosen language while some supplier information remains in another language. Automatic translation may be possible in some cases, but important booking conditions should still be checked carefully before payment. Customer names, passport details and other traveller information are normally entered as required for the booking and are not translated. Messages and travel documents may also follow the language supplied by the airline, hotel or booking source. Before launch, check which languages your plan supports and test a complete search and booking journey in each language you want to offer.

Question 7

Will my portal have hotels in small towns, or only in the big cities?

Accepted Answer

Yes, small towns do come up, but the choice there is usually much thinner than in a big city. A hotel booking API does not hold any hotels of its own. It passes your search on to suppliers who have signed agreements with properties, so your portal can only show what those suppliers have on their books for that place. In a large city or a well known tourist spot you will normally see hundreds of properties, with several room types and rates for each one. In a small town you may see ten or twenty, and often those are the ones that already sell online through the bigger travel sites. Family run guest houses, small lodges and homestays that only take bookings by phone are usually missing, because no supplier has ever signed them up. If your customers ask for one region a lot and it looks empty, the usual answer is to connect a second hotel supplier alongside the first. Suppliers are strong in different parts of the world, and one may cover an area well where another has almost nothing. Whether you can add one depends on your plan and on that supplier agreeing to work with you, so it is not something anyone can promise in advance. Before you decide, write down the twenty or thirty towns your customers really book most often and search each of them on a test portal. That gives you an honest picture of the coverage for your own business, instead of a general answer.

Question 8

Will my portal show my customer how much baggage is included before they pay for a flight?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your portal can show the baggage allowance before your customer pays, because the airline sends that information along with the fare. When a fare comes back from the supplier, it usually carries the cabin and checked baggage that the airline includes with that particular fare, and your portal can display it on the flight result and again on the review page before payment. This matters more than it used to, because airlines now sell the same route as several different fares, where the cheaper one carries less baggage than the one just above it, and your customer needs to see that difference to choose properly. Being honest about the limits, how complete this is depends on the supplier and on the airline. Some airlines publish a clean baggage allowance that displays neatly on the page, while others send it only inside the written fare rules, which read as a block of text rather than something your portal can put in a tidy line. Low cost carriers often include very little in the base fare and expect baggage to be bought as an extra, and whether your customer can buy that extra bag during booking, rather than later at the airport, depends on whether your supplier supports paid add ons for that airline. Before you go live, run a few searches on the routes you actually sell, on a full service airline and on a low cost one, and check what your portal shows at the result stage and on the payment page. If the allowance is missing for an airline you sell often, raise it with your supplier, since it is usually a matter of what their fare response carries rather than something your portal is holding back.

Question 9

Can my white label travel portal show prices in different currencies?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your white label travel portal can show prices in different currencies, if this option is included in your plan and supported by the connected travel suppliers and payment service. Customers may be able to choose a currency, or the portal may select one based on the market you serve. The amount shown in another currency is usually calculated using an exchange rate. That rate can change between the search and payment stages, so the final amount may differ from the first amount displayed. Some suppliers return prices in only one currency, and some bookings must be paid and completed in that same currency. The portal should make the final currency and total clear before the customer confirms the booking. Showing a currency does not always mean that you will receive the money in that currency. Your payment service may convert the payment before settlement, and the customer may also be charged a conversion fee by their card company. Refunds can be affected by later exchange rate changes, so the refunded amount on the customer's statement may not exactly match the amount originally paid. Check which selling, payment and settlement currencies are supported by your suppliers, payment service and glideFares plan before you make the option available to customers.

Question 10

If I use more than one hotel supplier, will the same hotel show up twice in my search results?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it can, and it is one of the first things to sort out when you connect more than one hotel supplier. Every supplier keeps its own list of properties, with its own internal codes and often its own spelling of the hotel name and address, so the same property can easily arrive from two places looking like two different hotels. The usual fix is hotel mapping. Before the results reach your customer, the portal compares properties coming from different suppliers by name, address, location and any shared reference the suppliers publish, then shows a single hotel with the room options from both suppliers grouped underneath it. Most of this is done automatically, but no mapping is ever perfect. Small guest houses, serviced apartments and recently opened properties are the ones most likely to slip through and appear twice. How well it works depends a great deal on what each supplier sends. Some provide a clean reference code that makes matching straightforward, while others send little more than a name and a town, and that is a limitation on the supplier side that nobody can fully remove. It is quite normal to keep a short list of manual corrections for the properties your agency sells most often. Before you switch a second supplier on for your customers, run a few searches in cities you know well and look carefully for the same hotel appearing more than once, then report any duplicates you spot so they can be corrected in your mapping.