Question 1

Can I see how many people visited my portal and where they gave up before booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. A portal is a normal website as far as visitor tracking goes, so it can be linked to the usual free analytics tools, and on top of that the booking side of the system keeps its own record of searches made and bookings completed. Between the two you can see how many people arrived, which pages they landed on, how many went as far as a search, and how many of those searches turned into a paid booking. The part most owners find useful is the drop off. Because a booking moves through clear steps, a search, a chosen result, passenger details and then payment, you can see the step where people stop. A lot of visitors searching but very few reaching the payment page usually points at price or at a slow search, while people reaching payment and then leaving usually points at something in the payment step itself. Two honest limits are worth knowing. Analytics tells you what happened, not why, so it points you at the problem rather than solving it. Numbers are also approximate, because privacy rules let visitors refuse tracking and their visits will not be counted. Card details and full personal information never appear in these reports, which is correct, but it does mean you cannot follow one named person through the site. Ask for the tracking to be linked to your own analytics account, so the data belongs to you, then look at your search to booking figures over a full month before drawing any conclusion from them.

Question 2

Will my portal have hotels everywhere in the world, or only in certain countries?

Accepted Answer

In most cases yes, you will have hotels in nearly every country, but the depth of that coverage varies a lot from one destination to another. Hotel supply reaches your portal through the suppliers you are connected to, and each supplier is stronger in some regions than others. A big European or Asian city will usually show hundreds of properties across every star rating, while a small town or a remote resort area may show only a handful, or occasionally none at all. The honest answer is that nobody can promise every hotel in the world. Some properties simply do not sell through any supplier, some are held back for particular markets, and some appear only for certain dates. So the right question is not whether a destination is covered, but whether it is covered well enough for the trips you actually sell. If you find a destination is thin, the usual fix is to add another supplier alongside your existing one, since two suppliers rarely have exactly the same properties. You can also load hotels you have contracted yourself, so your own local supply sits next to what the suppliers send. What is possible here depends on which suppliers you are able to sign up with and what your plan includes. Before you go live, run searches for the ten or fifteen destinations your customers ask for most, look at how many properties come back for real travel dates, and tell your team where the gaps are so they can be sorted out early.

Question 3

Can I add my own pages to my portal, such as an about us page or my terms and conditions?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can add your own pages to your portal, and most agencies do this before they go live. The pages people usually want are an about us page, a contact page, terms and conditions, a privacy notice, a cancellation policy and sometimes a blog or a set of destination guides. These sit alongside the booking search rather than inside it, so writing or editing them does not affect how flights and hotels are searched or sold. You control the wording, and the pages carry your own branding, so a traveller reading them sees your business and nobody else. There are two honest limits worth knowing. The first is that the words are yours to write. We can set up the pages and lay them out for you, but nobody can write your terms and conditions or your refund policy on your behalf, because those depend on your own business and on the rules in your country, and getting them wrong causes real problems later. The second is that how much you can change yourself, as opposed to asking us to change it, depends on your plan, so a simple text edit may be something you do in minutes while a new page layout may need our help. The sensible next step is to list the pages you want before your portal goes live, get your terms and your privacy notice checked by someone who knows the rules where you trade, and then ask us which of those pages you will be able to edit yourself.

Question 4

If my customer does not turn up for their flight, can I get any of the money back for them?

Accepted Answer

Usually yes, but only a part of it, and on some tickets nothing at all comes back. When a passenger simply does not travel, the airline treats the ticket as a no show. On most tickets sold by the full service airlines the fare itself is lost, while the taxes and some of the charges collected on the airline behalf can be claimed back, because those are only due when somebody actually flies. The airline decides what falls into that second group, and it often keeps a handling charge out of whatever is returned. On the cheapest fares, and on many budget airlines, the whole amount is treated as gone and there is nothing to claim. The claim is made against the airline rather than settled by your portal, so the money moves at the airline pace and not yours. Your portal raises the request, tracks it and shows you what has come back, but it cannot decide the outcome or speed it up. Waiting time varies a lot between airlines, and a claim raised long after the travel date is more likely to be refused, since airlines put a time limit on how late a no show refund can be asked for. The most useful habit is to raise the request as soon as you know the passenger did not travel, and to read the refund line in the fare rules on the booking screen before you tell a customer what they are likely to get back.

Question 5

Will somebody train my staff to use the portal, or do we have to work it out on our own?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you get help getting started, and no, you are not left to work it out on your own. When a portal goes live there is a handover session with your team, run online and screen shared, where we walk through the parts your staff will use every day. That usually means making a booking on behalf of a customer who has phoned in, finding an existing booking, issuing and cancelling, setting up staff logins, and pulling the reports you need at the end of the month. Most agencies find their counter staff are comfortable after one session, because the booking screens follow the same order they already work in. How much training is included does depend on your plan, so it is worth asking before you assume. A single handover and written guidance is normally part of any setup, while repeated sessions for a larger team, training for new joiners months later, or a session built around your own way of working may be arranged separately. If you take the API rather than a portal, the handover is with whoever builds your website instead, because your own screens are the ones your staff will see. Before your go live date, please send the team a list of who needs to be trained and what each person does, so the session covers the work they actually handle rather than everything at once.

Question 6

Is my customers personal and card information safe on my portal, and who is responsible for looking after it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is worth understanding how the responsibility is shared, because part of it sits with you. Card payments are handled by the payment provider you sign up with, on their own secure page, so full card numbers do not stay in your booking records. What your portal does keep is the ordinary booking information you would expect, names, contact details, travel dates and the document details a supplier asks for on international trips. That information has to be passed on to the airline or the hotel supplier to make the booking, which is normal and unavoidable, and once it reaches them it is held under their own rules. The portal side is protected by a secure connection, so anything your customers type goes across encrypted, and by the staff logins you control. Your part is to make sure the right people have access and nobody else. Be honest with yourself about the everyday risks, because they are usually simpler than people imagine. Shared logins, an old member of staff whose account was never switched off, and passwords written down near a desk cause far more trouble than anything technical. Give each person their own login, remove it the day they leave, and only ask your customers for documents when the supplier genuinely needs them. What you should do next is go through your list of portal users, close any account that belongs to someone who no longer works with you, and check what your own local rules say about how long you are allowed to keep customer records.

Question 7

Do I need my own agreement with each airline before their flights show on my portal?

Accepted Answer

In most cases no, you do not need a separate agreement with every airline before their flights start showing on your portal. Flights normally reach your portal through a supplier or consolidator who already holds those airline relationships, so you sell under their access rather than building your own from scratch. That is why a new portal can usually show a wide range of carriers from the first day it goes live. There are exceptions, and it is fair to know them early. Some low cost carriers, and some airlines in certain markets, only allow selling through a direct arrangement, so their fares will simply be missing until such an arrangement exists. Certain contracted or negotiated fares also sit behind an agreement of their own, which is why two agencies on similar portals can see different results for the same route. Whether you can add a direct airline connection later depends on your supplier, on the API you are connected to and on the plan you are on, so it is not something anyone can honestly promise in advance. What you almost always do need is your own agency identity for issuing and settlement, along with whatever paperwork your supplier asks for before moving you from test access to live access. That part is about who is responsible for the ticket if something goes wrong, not about each individual airline. Before you commit to anything, ask your intended supplier for the list of airlines already covered, check that the carriers your own customers actually fly are on it, and ask what would be involved in adding one that is not.

Question 8

If the same hotel comes from two different suppliers, will my customer see it listed twice?

Accepted Answer

No, in most cases your customer should see one entry for the hotel with the different rates grouped underneath it. Portals match the properties coming in from each supplier against a single list of hotels, so the same building is recognised as one property even when three or four suppliers are selling rooms in it. Your customer then picks a room and a rate, and the booking goes quietly to whichever supplier gave that rate. The matching is only as good as the details the suppliers send. Most of them send a name, an address and a position on the map, and that is usually enough. Trouble comes with properties that have changed brand recently, with small guest houses that share a name with others in the same town, and with new hotels a supplier has only just added, because a property that has not been matched yet can appear on its own line next to the one it belongs to. If you do spot the same hotel twice on your portal, it is worth reporting rather than ignoring, since these matches can be corrected so that the property joins the right group for everyone searching after that. It is also why the number of hotels a supplier claims to have and the number your search shows will rarely be the same figure. The next thing to do is search a city you know well and look for any property showing up on two lines, then pass those on so the mapping can be tidied up.

Question 9

Can I send my customer a quote from the portal before they decide to book?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can put together a quote from the search results and send it to your customer before anything is booked, though whether it goes out as an email, a shareable link or a document you download depends on your plan. The usual way it works is that you search as normal, pick two or three options you want the customer to consider, save them into a quote and send it under your own brand. The customer sees the flights or hotels you chose, the total you decided to show them, and nothing about where the rates came from. If your plan supports a link rather than an attachment, the customer can often pick the option they prefer and come back to you, or move straight into paying, which saves your team retyping everything. The honest limit is that a quote is not a booking and it does not hold anything. Fares and room rates are live, so a price you quoted in the morning can be gone by the evening, and seats or rooms can sell out while the customer is thinking. Some suppliers change more often than others. If the customer needs time, it is safer to ask whether the fare can be held for a short while rather than assuming the quoted price will still be there. The next thing to check is what your plan lets you send and how long your quotes stay valid, then send a test quote to yourself and see exactly what your customer will receive.

Question 10

Does my portal tell my customer whether a ticket can be changed or refunded before they pay for it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases. Airlines attach a set of fare rules to every fare they sell, and those rules say whether the ticket can be changed, whether it can be refunded, and what the airline charges for doing either. Your portal can pull those rules through with the fare and show them on the page where the customer reviews the trip, so they can read them before they reach the payment step. How much detail appears depends on the supplier behind the fare. Some suppliers send back a short, tidy summary that reads well on a booking page, saying plainly that a fare is refundable or not. Others send the airline's own wording, which is long and written for the trade rather than for a traveller, and the honest thing to do there is show it as it came rather than shorten it and risk changing its meaning. It also helps to remember that the rules describe what the airline allows, not what it will cost on the day. A fare may be changeable, but the customer still pays the airline's fee plus whatever the new fare costs at that moment, and that difference is not known until they actually ask to change. Saying that clearly at the time of booking saves an argument later. Look at one cheap fare and one flexible fare on a route you sell often, and check what your booking page shows about changes and refunds for each, so you know what your customers are seeing before they pay.