Question 1

Can my customer ask for a late arrival or a particular kind of bed when they book a hotel on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your customer can add a special request when they book a hotel room, but a request is never the same as a guarantee. At the booking step there is usually a free text box, or a short set of tick boxes, where the guest can ask for things like a late arrival, twin beds instead of a double, a quiet room, a high floor, or a cot for a small child. That note travels with the booking through the API to the supplier, and the supplier passes it to the hotel, where it sits on the reservation as a comment. It reaches the right people, but it is not something the hotel has agreed to in advance. Whether the hotel acts on it depends on the property and on how full it is that night. Some suppliers only forward a limited number of characters, and some drop anything they do not recognise, so short and plain wording works best. Requests that cost money, such as an extra bed or an early check in, are nearly always settled at the property itself and cannot be confirmed when the booking is made. If the difference really matters, it is safer to book the room type that already includes what the guest wants rather than to ask for it in a note. To keep expectations sensible, make sure the wording beside that box on your portal says plainly that requests are passed on but cannot be promised, and check with your supplier which of those fields they actually forward before you tell your customers to depend on them.

Question 2

Can my customer book a trip that stops in two or three cities on one ticket through my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a journey with several stops can be booked on your portal, though the choice on offer is usually narrower than it is for a simple return trip. Alongside one way and return, your search form can carry a multi city option where your customer enters each leg with its own date, so a trip out to one city, on to a second, then home again comes back as a single itinerary on one ticket. Being on one ticket matters more than most people realise, because if an earlier leg runs late the airline is the one responsible for putting the customer on the next flight. Legs booked separately often look cheaper on the day, but they leave the customer on their own as soon as something slips. What you will notice is fewer results than usual. Not every airline files a fare for every combination of cities, and the ones that do may allow only certain routings or a limited number of stops. Where there are many legs, or where the cities are served by airlines that do not work together, the search can come back thin or even empty although each leg on its own is easy to find. That is the way airlines price these trips rather than a fault in the portal. If multi city journeys are a regular part of what you sell, try a few of your usual routings on your own portal and tell our team which ones come back short, so we can check what your supplier allows on your plan.

Question 3

Can my portal be shown in more than one language for customers who do not read English?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can be shown in more than one language, and you decide which ones your customers are offered. The parts of the site we look after, such as the menus, the search boxes, the buttons, the emails and the pages you write yourself, can all be translated, and your customer can switch between the languages you have turned on. The honest limit is the content that arrives from a supplier. Hotel descriptions, room names, fare rules and cancellation terms come through the API in whatever language the supplier chooses to send, and very often that is English only. So a customer reading your site in another language may still come across an English room description, and nothing on our side can change what the supplier hands over. It is also worth looking at how the words sit on the page. Some languages need much more room than English, so a button that looks tidy in one language can run onto two lines in another, and a language written from right to left needs its own layout. Which languages are included, and whether the wording is translated for you or supplied by you, can depend on your plan, so please check that before you promise a language to a customer. A good next step is to work out which languages your customers really book in, then go through a search, a hotel page and the payment step in each of them, so you know exactly what stays in English before you tell anyone the site is available in their language.

Question 4

Can I get a report of everything my agency sold in a month to give to my accountant?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every booking that goes through your portal is recorded, and you can pull a report for any date range you choose. It normally shows the date of booking, the traveller name, the type of product, the supplier the booking came from, what your customer paid and what the supplier charged you, so the difference is your own margin. Most owners run this at the end of each month and download it as a spreadsheet to hand over. Be aware of what it does not include. The report only covers what actually passed through the portal. If your staff booked something directly with a supplier over the phone or on the supplier own website, it will not appear unless you enter it by hand, and whether you can add offline bookings depends on your plan. The amounts are also the ones the supplier returned at the time of booking, so if a commission is adjusted later or a cancellation fee is charged outside the portal, you will need to reconcile that part yourself. Payments are worth checking separately. If you collect money through a payment gateway, the portal can show you what was taken and what was refunded, but the money landing in your bank is settled by the gateway on its own cycle, so the two lists will not always agree on the same day. Accountants usually want both, the portal report and the gateway statement, and then match one against the other. Before your first month end, ask your accountant which columns they actually want and have the report set up that way from the start, and check whether it can be emailed to you automatically each month so nobody has to remember to run it.

Question 5

Can I sell hotels I have my own contract with alongside the ones that come from the API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most setups you can show hotels you have contracted yourself next to the ones that arrive through the supplier API, although how much of this is included depends on your plan. Your own hotels are normally loaded into the portal as a separate set of rooms and rates that you control. You decide the room types, the board basis, the price and the cancellation rules, and they appear in the same search results as the API hotels, so your customer never has to look in two places. Where the same property also comes from a supplier, you can usually choose which one your customer sees first, and many agencies put their own contract first because the margin on it is better. The part that is easy to underestimate is the daily upkeep. A hotel coming from an API updates its own availability and rates by itself, while a hotel you contract directly only shows what you have told the portal. If you sell a room you no longer hold, or forget to close a date, the booking will still confirm and you will be the one sorting it out with the hotel. Some hotels can keep this in step automatically through their channel manager, but that depends entirely on whether the hotel uses one. Before you begin, work out how many properties you really want to load, whether you hold allocation or sell on request, and who on your team will keep the rates and stop dates current. Then check with your account contact whether direct contracting is part of your current plan, as it is not always included in the basic setup.

Question 6

Will my portal show budget airlines as well as the big well known airlines?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases it can, but budget airlines do not always arrive through the same connection as the traditional airlines, so they usually have to be switched on as an extra supplier rather than appearing on their own. Once that is in place, a low cost flight sits in the same result list as any other flight and your customer does not need to know where it came from. There are a few things that behave differently with these airlines. Their headline fare is often the bare seat only, with bags, seats and sometimes even a card fee charged on top, so the first figure your customer sees can be lower than what they finally pay. A good portal shows those extras before payment wherever the supplier passes that detail back, but not every budget airline sends it in the same level of detail, so how much your customer sees varies from one airline to another. Be aware too that changes, cancellations and refunds on these tickets follow the airline own rules, and those rules are usually stricter than on a normal ticket. Some of them do not allow agents to make bookings at all in certain countries, so coverage depends on where you are selling and which suppliers your plan includes. The sensible next step is to ask which low cost content is already included in your setup, then run a test search on a route where you know a budget airline flies, so you can see what your customers will actually get before you promise it to them.

Question 7

If a hotel cancels my customer's room after the booking is confirmed, will I find out in time to book something else?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will be told, although how quickly depends on the supplier the room came from. When a hotel releases a room it has already confirmed, which usually happens because the property is overbooked or has closed part of the building for repairs, the supplier sends a cancellation back through the booking connection. Your portal picks that up and the booking status changes from confirmed to cancelled, so your team can see it without having to phone the hotel. The honest part is the timing. Some suppliers report this within minutes, some only during their own office hours, and a small number of properties do not tell anybody until the guest is standing at the desk. That last case is not common, but it is the reason we suggest your team looks again at any booking made a long way ahead, and any booking at an unusually low rate, as the arrival date gets closer. What comes back to your customer is normally everything they paid for the room, because the cancellation came from the hotel side and not from them. Rebooking is a separate job. The portal will not go and find another room on its own, so somebody on your team has to search again and confirm the new stay, and the room you find may not cost the same as the one that was lost. If this matters to the way you work, ask us which of your hotel suppliers pass cancellations back automatically and which do not, and set up an alert on your side so a change in status reaches a person instead of sitting on a screen nobody is watching.

Question 8

Can my staff make a booking for a customer over the phone, or does the customer have to do it themselves on the portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your staff can make the booking for a customer over the phone. A white label portal normally comes with a staff login that sits behind the same booking engine your customers see, so your team can search, compare, hold and confirm a flight or a hotel on the customer's behalf while they are still on the call. The customer never has to open the website at all. The useful part is what your staff can do that a customer cannot. From the staff side your team can usually adjust the markup or give a discount on that one booking, type in the traveller details themselves, attach an internal note for their colleagues, and take the payment in a way you would not offer to the public, such as a bank transfer or an office card. Once it is confirmed, the customer receives the same confirmation email, ticket or hotel voucher they would have received had they booked it online themselves. It is fair to be honest about the limits. Whatever the supplier or the fare rules say still applies, so a booking made by your staff is no easier to change, cancel or refund later than one the customer made online. Some payment methods and some suppliers also have to be switched on for your account before staff booking works from end to end, and that depends on your plan and on the agreements behind your portal. The next thing to look at is which of your people should hold a staff login and what each of them is allowed to do with it, because the power to change a fare or cancel a booking is worth keeping with the few staff you trust with it.

Question 9

Will I be told if the airline changes the time of my customer's flight after the booking is made?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will be told, but the message reaches you through the supplier rather than directly from the airline, so how quickly it arrives varies. When an airline moves a departure time, cancels a leg or changes an aircraft, it sends a notice into the booking system. Your portal picks that notice up and flags the booking so your team can see that something has moved and act on it. How the flag reaches you depends on the supplier and on the type of fare. Some suppliers push these notices out quickly and in a form your portal can read straight away. Others only make them visible when the booking is looked at again, and a few send them by message to the agency rather than through the connection at all. Low cost carrier bookings are usually the weakest here, because those airlines often talk to the passenger directly and leave the agent out of the loop. For this reason it is safer to treat the portal flag as a helpful warning rather than as your only line of defence. Agencies that handle a lot of air travel usually keep a habit of checking departures again a few days before travel, especially over holiday periods and in bad weather seasons, when schedules move most. Ask which of your air suppliers pass schedule change notices through to the portal, and decide who on your team owns the job of watching that list and telling the traveller.

Question 10

Can I decide how much I add on top of the supplier fare before my customer sees the price?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you decide what is added on top of the supplier fare, and your customer only sees the final price. A white label portal is built to be sold under your own name, so the commercial side is usually left in your hands. You can normally set a markup as a flat amount or as a percentage, and apply it differently to flights, hotels and other products. Many setups also let you vary it by supplier, by route or region, or by the type of customer, so a corporate account can be treated differently from a walk in traveller. The customer sees one total price with the usual taxes and fees, never your own cost. There are honest limits, and it is fair to know them before you plan your margins. Some airline and hotel content comes with supplier rules about how a fare may be displayed or sold, and in those cases the room you have to add on top is smaller, or the amount has to sit alongside the fare as a service fee rather than inside it. Payment gateway charges are their own line and are not something you can hide inside a markup. How detailed your rules can be also depends on the plan you are on, since finer control by route, cabin or staff group is not always part of a basic setup. The sensible next step is to write down the rules you actually want, such as what you add on flights, what you add on hotels and whether any group of customers is treated differently, then check each one against the supplier agreements you already hold before you go live.