Question 1

Do I get the airline's booking reference and ticket number straight away when I book a flight through your API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in nearly all cases the airline booking reference comes back as soon as the booking is confirmed, and the ticket number follows once the ticket has actually been issued. Both are returned in the API response or through a retrieve booking call, so you can store them against the customer record and show them on the itinerary you send out. It helps to know that the two things are not the same. The booking reference is the airline's record of the reservation and lets your customer or your staff look the trip up with the airline. The ticket number is the proof that the seat has been paid for and issued. If your setup books and issues in a single step, you will usually see both in the same response. If booking and ticketing are two separate steps, you get the reference first and the ticket number after the issue request goes through, which may be seconds later or may take a few minutes depending on the airline. Low cost carriers often work differently. Many of them use one reference for the whole booking and do not produce a traditional ticket number at all, so do not treat a missing ticket number as a failed booking on those airlines. What you receive and how quickly also depends on the supplier behind each airline in your account, so the behaviour can vary between carriers on the same portal. The practical step is to save whatever references the API returns against every booking and have your staff check the retrieve booking response before telling a customer a ticket is issued, and ask us which airlines in your setup ticket instantly so you know what to expect.

Question 2

Can I move my existing customer details and past bookings into new travel agency software?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually bring your existing records across when you move to new travel agency software, though how smoothly it goes depends on what shape your current records are in. Customer details are normally the easiest part. If you can export your contacts into a spreadsheet with names, contact details, passport information and any notes sitting in separate columns, that can generally be loaded in so your staff are not retyping everything from scratch. The tidier the spreadsheet, the better the result, so it is worth taking a little time to remove duplicates and fix the columns before you hand it over. If your records only exist on paper or buried inside old emails, there is no shortcut, but you can add those customers gradually as they come back to you rather than all in one go. Past bookings are more mixed. They can usually be brought in as historical records, so you keep your sales history and can look up what a customer travelled on before. What they will not become is live bookings you can amend or cancel in the new system, because the supplier who issued them still holds the actual reservation. Anything still due to travel is normally safest handled through the original supplier or portal until the trip is finished, then your new software becomes the single place you work from. The practical next step is to export a sample of your customers and bookings from whatever you use today and send it over, so you can be told clearly what will map across and what will need filling in by hand.

Question 3

Can my customers search for hotels near a particular place, like a hospital or a wedding venue?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can, although how precise it gets depends on the supplier data sitting behind the search. Hotel booking APIs normally allow a few ways of searching. The simplest is by city or region, which returns everything your suppliers hold in that area. Many also accept a point on the map, meaning a set of coordinates plus a distance you choose, so you can ask for hotels within a short radius of one spot. Some suppliers additionally carry a list of well known landmarks, airports, stations and districts that you can search against by name. If the place your customer cares about is a small local venue, such as a particular hospital, church or wedding hall, it will usually not exist as a named landmark in the supplier data, so the practical approach is to search around its map location instead. Results normally come back with each hotel's address and its coordinates, which means your portal can plot them on a map and sort them by distance from the point you picked. How trustworthy that distance is depends on how accurate the supplier's location data is for each property, and that does vary between suppliers and between countries. Before you put it in front of customers, it is worth spot checking a few hotels you already know well to see whether they appear where you would expect. A good next step is to tell us the kinds of searches your customers ask for most often, so we can confirm which of your suppliers support them and set up the search options on your portal to match.

Question 4

Can I choose seats for my customer when I book a flight through your API, or do they have to sort that out with the airline later?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually offer seat selection through a flight booking API, but how much you are able to do depends on the airline and on the supplier sitting behind the booking. Where an airline shares its seat map, the API can return the cabin layout along with the seats that are still free, and you or your customer can pick one during the booking or after the ticket is issued. Some seats come at no extra charge and others, such as extra legroom or the rows near the front, carry a fee that is added to the booking as a separate service. That fee is shown to you before you confirm, so you can decide whether to pass it on and keep the total clear for your customer. The limits are worth knowing before you advertise it. Not every airline makes seat maps available to agents, and a few only open seats at online check in, so the most you can do is record a preference such as aisle or window. Low cost carriers often charge for every seat. Some seats are always held back for crew, for families or for passengers who need assistance. On certain airlines a seat you choose is sent as a request and confirmed a little later rather than instantly, and if the aircraft is changed the seat can move. Before you promise seat choice to a customer, check which of the airlines you sell most often support seat maps on your plan, and add a short line to your booking flow that tells customers when a seat is confirmed and when it is only a request.

Question 5

Can I choose which hotels and airlines show on my white label travel portal, or do I have to display everything my suppliers offer?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can control what appears on your portal rather than showing every single option your suppliers return. Most travel businesses want this at some point, either because they have a direct contract with certain hotels they would rather sell, or because there are airlines or properties they have had problems with and do not want to offer to their customers. The usual way this works is through settings on your portal that tell it what to include or leave out of search results. Depending on what you are selling, that can mean switching a whole supplier on or off, limiting results to certain destinations or regions, hiding specific properties, or excluding certain airlines or fare types. Once the rule is saved, your customers simply never see the excluded option, so there is nothing for your staff to remember or filter by hand. How far you can go does depend on your plan and on the agreements behind each supplier. Some suppliers send their content as a single feed with limited room to pick and choose item by item, and some contracts expect you to display what is offered. It is also worth being careful about blocking too much, because in smaller towns or on quiet dates you may be left with thin results and lose bookings you would otherwise have taken. The sensible next step is to write down exactly what you want to exclude and why, then go through that list with your account contact so you can see which parts can be set up as portal rules and which depend on the supplier.

Question 6

Can I get a report of all my bookings for the month to give to my accountant?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can usually pull a report of your bookings for any date range and hand it to your accountant as a spreadsheet. The software keeps a record of every booking made on your portal and by your staff, so your booking list is the starting point. In most setups you can filter that list by dates, by product type such as hotels or flights, by booking status such as confirmed or cancelled, and by the agent who made the sale. You can then export what you see to a file and open it in a spreadsheet programme, which is normally enough for an accountant to work from without needing access to the system itself. There are a few honest limits worth knowing. What appears on each line depends on what the supplier sends back, so the detail you get for one product may be richer than for another. Whether your markup and your earnings show on the report, and whether you can give a bookkeeper a read only login of their own, usually depends on the plan you are on and the permissions you set. A direct link into an accounting package is not something to assume is included, so please check before you build a monthly process around it. Refunds and cancellation charges can also land after a month has closed, which your accountant will want to allow for. Before your next reporting period, run an export covering a week you already know well and compare it with your own records, then show it to your accountant and tell us which columns are missing so we can confirm what is possible on your plan.

Question 7

Can my hotel booking API let customers choose between paying me now or paying at the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in many cases you can, because hotel suppliers often return prepaid rates alongside rates that are settled directly at the property, and your portal can show them next to each other so the customer picks what suits them. A prepaid rate means the money is taken at the time of booking, so your agency holds the payment and settles with the supplier in the normal way. A pay at hotel rate means the guest gives card details to guarantee the room and pays the bill at reception, so you earn on the booking without the funds passing through your account. The two kinds of rate usually carry different cancellation rules, and the stricter rules are not always on the prepaid side, so it is worth reading the conditions that come back with each rate rather than assuming which is safer. What you can actually offer is decided by the suppliers connected to your account rather than by us. Some send only prepaid inventory, some send a mix, and that mix can vary by country, by chain and even by individual property. Local taxes and city charges are also commonly collected at the hotel even on a prepaid booking, so the amount your customer pays you and the amount they pay at reception may not be the whole story, and it helps to make that clear on your confirmation. Run a few searches in the destinations you sell most and look at which payment types are coming back, then tell us whether you want both options visible to customers or only one, and we can set your portal up that way.

Question 8

Can I give other travel agents their own login to my white label portal so they can book and I earn on their sales?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a white label portal can usually be set up with a separate login area for other agents, though whether this is included depends on your plan, so please confirm it before you promise anything to the agents you want to sign up. In practice you end up with two front doors to the same portal, one for the public and one for your trade partners, both carrying your brand. When it is switched on, each agent you approve gets their own username and password and sees your branding, not ours and not the supplier's. You decide the markup they see, and you can normally set different markup levels for different agents or groups, so a high volume partner can be given sharper pricing than a new one. Their bookings land in your own reporting alongside everything else, so you can see who is selling what. The honest limits are worth knowing. You remain the contracted party for those bookings, so if an agent makes a mistake or a customer disputes a charge, the supplier will look to you. How your agents pay is your decision too. Letting them pay by card at the time of booking is simplest, while giving them a credit balance to draw against means you are carrying their risk until they settle. Some suppliers also place conditions on reselling their inventory, so a rate that works for your direct customers will not always be available to pass on. The next step is to tell us how many trade partners you expect and how you want them to pay, and we can confirm what your plan covers and help you set your agent pricing rules before you invite anyone in.

Question 9

Can I cancel or change a hotel booking through the API myself, or do I have to contact the supplier?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can cancel a hotel booking directly through the API without emailing anyone, but changing a booking is a different matter and often has to be handled as a cancellation followed by a fresh booking. When you send a cancellation through the API, the request goes to the supplier holding the booking and comes back with a result you can see on screen, including a cancellation reference and any charge that applies. If you are still inside the free cancellation window, the booking should close with nothing to pay. If the deadline has passed, or the rate was non refundable from the start, the supplier applies its own charge and the API simply reports it. Some suppliers cancel instantly while others return a pending status and confirm shortly after, so refresh the booking before you tell your customer it is done. Changes are more limited. Very few hotel suppliers let you alter dates, room type or the number of guests on a booking that is already confirmed, because the rate you originally held may no longer be on sale. Guest name corrections are sometimes accepted and sometimes not. What you can do depends on the supplier behind that particular rate and on the connections included in your plan, so the honest answer is that it varies from one booking to the next rather than being the same across the whole system. Before you promise anything to a customer, read the cancellation terms shown at the time of booking and check with us which of your connected suppliers accept amendments, so your staff know when to cancel and rebook instead of trying to change.

Question 10

Can I hold a flight for my customer for a day or two before they pay?

Accepted Answer

Yes, on some airlines, but not on all of them, and your flight booking API will tell you which ones. When you pick a fare, the airline behind it decides whether a seat can be held without payment. Many of the larger airlines that sell through the main airline reservation systems allow a booking to be created and left unticketed until a deadline they set. In that case the API gives you back the booking reference along with a ticketing time limit, so you can send your customer the itinerary while they make up their mind. A lot of low cost airlines work the other way round. Their fares are only confirmed once payment has gone through, so the only way to keep that price is to book and pay in one go. The length of a hold is not something we decide. It comes from the airline, and it can be very short on busy routes, close to departure, or on heavily discounted fares. If the deadline passes without ticketing, the airline normally cancels the booking on its own, and the same fare may not be there when your customer comes back. So it is safer to treat a hold as a courtesy rather than a guarantee, and to make sure the deadline is clearly visible to whoever is handling the file. It also helps to remember that a held booking is not a confirmed ticket, so your customer cannot travel on it or use it for a visa application. Before you build your sales process around holds, check which of your connected airlines allow them and what time limits they give, and ask our team to show you where the ticketing deadline appears in the booking details your API returns.