Question 1

Will my portal show photos and a proper description for every hotel, or will some come up blank?

Accepted Answer

Yes, most hotels will show photos and a written description, but a small number will come up bare, and the quality is not the same everywhere. The pictures and the text do not come from your portal itself. They come from the supplier whose rooms you are selling, and every supplier gathers that content in its own way. Well known city hotels usually arrive with plenty of good images. Small guest houses, apartments and properties that have only just been added often have very few, and sometimes none at all. When the same hotel reaches you from more than one supplier, your portal can take the better set of images and the fuller description, so your customer sees the strongest version rather than the emptiest one. Where no content is supplied at all, the page will still show the hotel name, the address and the room details, because those come through even when pictures do not. If a hotel matters to your business and its content looks thin, you have a couple of ways to improve it. You can load your own photos and write your own description for that property in your admin panel, and your version is what customers will see instead of the supplier one. You can also ask whether richer content is available on your plan, because some suppliers offer far more images than a basic feed carries. The sensible thing to do next is to open your portal, search the destinations you sell most often, and note any hotels that appear with no picture. Fix those in the admin panel yourself, or send the list to your support contact.

Question 2

Can my customer choose their seat on the plane while booking a flight on my portal?

Accepted Answer

In many cases yes, but it depends on the airline behind the fare. Some airlines send their seat map through the flight API, so your customer can open a picture of the cabin during booking and pick a window or an aisle seat before paying. Other airlines do not share the seat map at that stage, and the seat can only be chosen later on the airline's own website using the booking reference, or at check in. Where seat selection is available on the portal, free seats and paid seats are usually shown separately. If your customer picks a paid seat, the extra charge is added to what they pay you, and it is passed on to the airline with the booking. Low cost airlines tend to sell almost every seat this way, while full service airlines often keep a set of seats free for the passenger to take without paying. There are honest limits worth knowing. Not every supplier in your portal will support seat selection, so the option may appear for one airline and not for another on the same search page. Seats for infants, for large groups and for some discounted fares are often blocked. Even after a seat is confirmed, an airline can move a passenger if it changes the aircraft, so a seat is a request the airline holds rather than a promise nobody can break. Before you tell your customers they can pick seats, ask which of your connected airlines and suppliers actually return seat maps on your plan, and make one test booking with each so you know what your staff will see.

Question 3

Will my portal tell my customer whether they need a visa for the country they are flying to?

Accepted Answer

No, a portal does not check visa or passport rules for your customer on its own. The flight and hotel content that reaches your portal through an API is about availability, price and the booking itself, and it very rarely carries the entry rules for the destination. Unless something is added for this, a customer can book and pay for a trip they are not allowed to take, and the first anyone hears about it is at the airport check in desk. What a portal can do well is put the warning in front of the traveller at the right moment. You can show a clear notice on the passenger details page and repeat it on the confirmation, saying that visas, entry rules and passport validity are the traveller's own responsibility, and pointing them to the embassy or the official government site of the country they are visiting. That wording is yours to write, so you can make it as firm and as specific as your business needs. Some portals go further and connect to a separate travel document service that returns the likely rules for a given nationality and destination. Whether you can add that depends on your plan and on whether such a service covers the markets you sell in, and it is normally a service you pay for on its own, so ask before you assume it is included. Even when it is switched on, treat the result as guidance rather than a guarantee, because these rules change at short notice and only the embassy or consulate can give a final answer. The sensible next step is to decide what your own agency is willing to promise about travel documents, write that into the notice your customers see before they pay, and then ask what document checking options your plan supports.

Question 4

Can my customer see the hotel's cancellation deadline before they pay on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in nearly every case the cancellation terms arrive together with the room rate and can be shown to your customer before they pay. Hotel suppliers send the policy attached to each rate, so a room that can be cancelled free until a certain date will say so, and a room that cannot be cancelled at all will be shown as non refundable. Your portal can display that on the room results, again on the review page and once more on the confirmation the customer receives. Where it gets less tidy is the wording. Every supplier writes its policy in its own way. Some send an exact date and time, some send a number of days before arrival, and a few send a short line of text instead of a clean date. Your portal can only show what the supplier gives it, so on a small number of rates your customer will read a sentence rather than a neat deadline. It is worth checking how your own suppliers word this before you go live. One thing that catches people out is the clock. A free cancellation deadline is normally the local time at the hotel, not the time where your customer is sitting, so a booking that looks cancellable until midnight may already be past the cut off in another country. It also helps to remember that the deadline applies to the cancellation reaching the supplier, not to the customer deciding to cancel. Run a few searches in the destinations you sell most and look at how the policy reads on the results page, the payment page and the voucher, and tell us if any supplier's wording needs to be presented more clearly for your customers.

Question 5

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

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can bring your customer list and your past bookings across, but how much comes over depends on what you are able to export from your old system. If your current software or even your spreadsheet can give you a file of customer names, contact details and booking records, that file can usually be loaded in before you go live, so your staff are not starting with an empty screen on day one. Customer details are the easy part. Names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses sit in simple columns and move across cleanly. Past bookings are harder, because every system stores them in its own way, and supplier references, ticket numbers and payment records may not line up one for one. When that happens the old bookings are normally brought in as history your staff can read and search, rather than as live bookings, because a booking made in another system cannot be changed or cancelled through a new one. There are limits worth knowing about. Your old provider has to be willing to release the data, and some will only give you a partial export or none at all. You should also only carry over the customer information you have a proper reason to keep, since that data belongs to your customers and not to the software. Before you settle on a switching date, ask your old provider for a sample export and check that it really contains the fields you care about, then agree with us what will be loaded and what will simply be left behind.

Question 6

Do I need my own contracts with airlines and hotels before I can start selling on my portal?

Accepted Answer

No, you do not need your own airline or hotel contracts before you can start selling. A white label travel portal comes connected to supplier systems that already hold that inventory, so the flights, hotels and other travel on your site are supplied through those connections rather than through agreements you sign yourself. Your customer sees your brand and books with you, and the booking is passed through to the supplier behind the scenes. This is the reason most agencies start this way. Signing directly with airlines and hotel chains usually takes accreditation, deposits and a lot of time, and none of that is quick to arrange when you are new. Selling through the supplier connections lets you open with a full range of travel from the first day, and you still control the branding and the amount you add on top of the supplier fare. There are limits worth knowing. Which suppliers you can use depends on your plan and on the supplier itself, and some of them will still ask you to open your own account with them and give us your credentials before their content can be switched on. A few markets and a few types of content also carry their own rules about who may sell them, so what is available to you may not be identical to what another agency sees. If you do sign your own hotel or airline contracts later, those can usually be added alongside the supplier content rather than replacing it. The next thing to check is which suppliers your plan includes and whether any of them need an account in your own name, as that is what decides how quickly you can go live.

Question 7

Do the hotel prices on my portal include all the taxes, or will my customer be asked for more money at the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the price your customer sees on your portal normally includes the taxes the supplier is able to collect in advance, but a small number of local charges can still be payable directly at the property, so it helps to know which is which. When a hotel booking API returns a room, it usually sends a total price together with a breakdown of the room rate and the taxes already included in it. Your portal shows that total, so your customer is looking at an amount they can actually pay online. Any margin you have chosen to add sits inside the same total, so the customer sees one clear amount to pay rather than a list of extras appearing later at the payment page. The part that varies is the local charges some hotels collect themselves, such as a city or tourism tax, or a daily property fee. These are set by the hotel or the local authority, not by us, and they are collected at the hotel counter at check in or check out. Most suppliers send these to us as a separate note on the room so your portal can display them clearly before booking, but not every supplier is equally consistent, and a hotel that introduces a new local charge may take time to appear in the supplier data. Where the information is sent, your portal shows it. Where it is missing, we cannot invent it. Before you go live, book a test room in a destination you sell often and read the room conditions your portal displays, then compare them with the voucher your customer receives. If you find a supplier that regularly leaves local charges out, tell your account contact so the room conditions wording can be reviewed for that supplier.

Question 8

Can I tell if someone is trying to book on my portal with a stolen card?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can spot a risky booking before it goes through, but no system can promise you that a card is genuine. Your portal can be set up to flag bookings that look unusual, such as several failed payment attempts in a row, a passenger name that does not match the cardholder, a departure that is only hours away, or the same person trying one card after another. Those bookings can be held for your staff to check instead of being confirmed straight away. Most of the real checking happens at the payment step rather than in the booking screens. The card gateway you use runs its own fraud rules and asks the cardholder to confirm the payment with their bank, and that bank check is the strongest protection you have. How much detail you get back about why a payment was refused depends on the gateway and the plan you hold with them, so ask them directly what fraud tools are included before you rely on it. It helps to be clear about where the money risk sits. If a booking is disputed later, the loss usually falls on whoever took the payment, and with flight tickets the danger is that the ticket is issued as soon as the payment clears, so the supplier has already been paid before the dispute arrives. Hotels booked on a pay at the hotel basis carry much less of this risk. Ask your payment provider which fraud checks are switched on for your account, then decide which kinds of bookings you want your portal to hold for a manual look before they are confirmed.

Question 9

Can my portal sit on my own website address so customers never see another company's name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can run on your own website address, and for most agencies that is the normal way to set it up. You point your domain, or a section of it kept aside for booking, at the portal, and from then on your customers see your own name in the address bar and in the confirmation emails that reach them. The booking pages do not need to carry anybody else's name anywhere on them. Setting this up is a small piece of work that usually happens once, right at the start. You keep ownership of the domain, so you buy it and renew it in your own company name, and a change is made with whoever you bought it from so that the address points to the right place. A security certificate is added at the same time so the address shows as safe in the browser, which matters a great deal when customers are typing card details on those pages. There are a couple of honest limits worth knowing. While a card payment is going through, your customer may briefly see the address of the bank or payment company handling it, because that page belongs to them and not to you, and the same can happen with a few supplier pages that open in a new window. Whether your emails arrive reliably from your own address also depends on your email provider, so that part may need a small change at their end as well. If this matters to you, settle on the exact address you want before you launch, and check that the domain is registered in your own company name so that you are never locked out of it later.

Question 10

Can my customer book two or three rooms for their family in one hotel booking on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your customer can put more than one room into a single hotel booking on your portal. When they search, they say how many rooms they need and how many adults and children are staying in each one, and the results come back priced for the whole party rather than for one room at a time. At the end they pay once and receive one confirmation that lists every room. How many rooms can go into one booking depends on the supplier behind that hotel. Many suppliers allow a handful of rooms in one go, and above that they expect it to be sent as a group request, which is handled differently and often needs a person to confirm it. Some hotels also limit how many rooms of the same type they will sell to one guest for the same nights, so a search can come back with fewer rooms than your customer asked for. It is worth knowing that the rooms in one booking normally share the same dates and the same cancellation terms. If your customer wants different arrival dates for different rooms, or wants to be able to cancel one room and keep the others, those are usually made as separate bookings. Guest names are collected room by room, so it helps if your customer has the names of everybody staying before they start. Before you promise a family or a small group that they can book everything together, run a test search on your portal for the number of rooms they need, see what the supplier actually returns, and read the cancellation terms shown against that room so you know what your customer is agreeing to.