Question 1

Can my customer book a hotel room for three or four people, or does my portal only allow two guests in a room?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can take a booking for three or four people in one room, as long as the hotel itself sells a room that holds that many guests. When your customer sets the number of adults and children on the search screen, that occupancy is sent to the supplier, and the rooms that come back are the ones the property has said can genuinely hold that party. If nothing suitable exists for that group, the search will simply show fewer results rather than let you book a room the hotel would turn away at the front desk. What is on offer varies a lot from one property to another. Many hotels sell triple, quad or family rooms, while others only sell doubles and expect a larger party to be split across two rooms. Some will add a rollaway bed or a cot on request, and that is often settled at the property rather than through the portal, so it will not always appear in the amount your customer pays you at the time of booking. Children are the part that catches people out. Most suppliers ask for the age of every child travelling, because the age decides whether the child stays free, needs an extra bed, or is counted as an adult for pricing. If the ages are entered loosely the room may still confirm, but the family can be asked to pay a difference at check in. That rule comes from the hotel and the supplier rather than from the portal, so the safest habit is to enter real ages every time. Before you go live, run a search on a destination you know well for three adults and one child, and check that your booking screen is asking for each child's age and not just a count of children.

Question 2

Can my customers book business class or premium economy on my portal, or only economy?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can sell the higher cabins as well as economy, and the customer normally picks the cabin before the search runs. The cabin choice is passed to the supplier along with the route and the dates, and what comes back is whatever that airline has left for sale in that cabin on that day. Business class is the most reliable of the upper cabins, because nearly every airline files it the same way. Premium economy is the one to watch, since airlines describe it in different ways, and a search for it can quietly return ordinary economy seats from a carrier that does not really sell a separate premium cabin. First class appears only on the small number of airlines that still offer it. How complete the results are also depends on the supplier feed behind your portal. Some feeds carry the full range of cabins for the airlines they cover, others are set up mainly for economy content and will return very little when a higher cabin is asked for. If your business leans towards corporate travel, this is worth checking before you go live, rather than finding out when a client asks for a business class quote. Run a test search in each cabin on the routes your customers use most, look closely at what comes back for premium economy in particular, and ask your supplier which cabins they support for the airlines that matter to you.

Question 3

Can I offer my regular customers reward points or a loyalty discount on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can reward repeat customers, though how you do it depends on what your plan includes. The simplest method, and the one that works everywhere, is a discount code you create yourself and hand to the customers you want to reward. You decide who gets it, how long it lasts and what it applies to, and it comes off the total at the payment stage like any other code. A proper points scheme, where every booking earns something the customer can spend later, is a bigger piece of work. It needs the portal to keep a running balance against each customer record and to let that balance be redeemed at checkout, so it is not something every setup has switched on by default. Ask your provider whether points are part of your plan before you advertise a scheme to your customers, because rebuilding a promise after the fact is awkward. One thing to keep in mind is where the money comes from. A discount or a redeemed point reduces your own margin, not the airline or hotel rate, since the supplier still charges you the same amount. So set the reward against the markup you earn rather than against the fare itself, and check that a generous code cannot push a booking below what you actually pay. The practical next step is to start with codes for your best customers, watch how much they cost you over a few months, and only then ask about a full points scheme once you know what you can afford to give away.

Question 4

Does my portal tell my customer what time they can check in and check out of the hotel?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases those times are shown, but they come from the supplier and they are not always filled in for every property. The check in and check out times sit in the hotel information that the supplier sends along with the rates, so your portal displays them on the hotel page and carries them onto the voucher your customer receives. Larger hotels and chains almost always provide them. Some small guest houses and apartments do not, and when the supplier sends nothing, your portal leaves the field blank rather than inventing a time. So a missing time is not a fault in the booking, it simply means the property has not published one. It is also worth telling your customers that these are the hotel's standard times, not a promise about their own room. If somebody wants to arrive in the morning or stay on until the evening, that is a request the front desk decides on the day, and it may carry a charge set by the hotel. Adding it as a special request when booking helps, but it is not a guarantee, and nobody at your end can confirm it in advance. Before you send the voucher, look at whether the times are actually there, and if the field is empty for a property your customer is arriving at late, contact the hotel directly and pass the answer on.

Question 5

Can my customer ask for a wheelchair or a special meal when they book a flight on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases these requests can be collected during the booking and sent on to the airline with the reservation, so your customer does not have to call anyone separately. It helps to understand what actually happens to that request. It goes to the airline as a request, not as a confirmed service, and the airline decides whether to accept it. Sometimes it is accepted straight away, sometimes the answer only comes back nearer the departure date, and occasionally it is only settled at the airport. Meal choices also depend on the route and the cabin, and on a short flight where nothing is served there may be no meal option at all. How much of this reaches the airline depends on the supplier and on the type of connection behind the fare. Some connections pass a full list of assistance and meal requests, others accept only a few common ones, and several low cost carriers handle assistance only through their own website or their own call centre, which means your team would need to arrange it there. Airlines can also ask for assistance requests to be made a certain length of time before departure. For anything your customer genuinely depends on, such as wheelchair help or a medical need, the safest thing is to place the request on the booking and then confirm directly with the airline that it has been accepted before the day of travel.

Question 6

Can I take payment from my customer by bank transfer or in cash and still confirm the booking on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. A booking portal does not force every sale through a card payment page. When a customer pays you by bank transfer, or hands over cash at your counter, your staff can make the booking from the back office and mark it as paid by that method, so the ticket or voucher is issued in the normal way and your records still show how the money came in. This is how most agencies handle walk in customers and regular corporate clients who prefer to settle by transfer at the end of the month. The customer never has to touch the payment page at all. You simply confirm the booking once you are satisfied the money has arrived, and the confirmation that goes out to the traveller looks exactly the same as one paid by card. The honest part is that the money still has to be with the supplier for the ticket to be issued, and that comes out of your own account or deposit rather than from the customer's card. So the risk of taking a booking before the transfer has actually cleared sits with you, not with the supplier. Which payment methods you can record, and whether the portal can hold a booking as unpaid until you release it, depends on how your setup is configured and on the plan you are on. Before you offer transfer or cash terms widely, agree with your team a simple rule about who is allowed to confirm a booking that has not been paid for yet, and check that your sales reports show the payment method clearly so nothing gets lost at the end of the month.

Question 7

Can my customers add their frequent flyer number when they book a flight on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases a frequent flyer number can be entered while the booking is being made, and it is passed to the airline along with the passenger details. The field usually sits with the traveller information, next to the name and date of birth, so your staff or your customer can add it at the same time as everything else. Whether it works for every airline depends on the supplier the fare came from. Some connections accept a loyalty number for any carrier they sell, others accept it only for the airline that operates the flight, and a few low cost carriers do not take one at all through a booking channel. If the number belongs to a partner airline rather than the operating one, the airline may still accept it, but that is their decision and not something the booking can guarantee. It is also worth being clear with customers about what adding the number does. It tells the airline who the traveller is so miles can be credited, but the credit itself, and the tier benefits that go with it, are decided by the airline under its own programme rules. Some discounted and negotiated fares earn fewer miles or none at all, and that is set by the airline, not by the booking. If loyalty numbers matter to your customers, check with your supplier which airlines accept them through your connection, and tell your customers they can add the number to the booking with the airline directly if it was missed at the time of booking.

Question 8

Will my customers get a reminder before their trip, or do I have to send it myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the portal can send an automatic reminder before travel, though whether it is switched on for you depends on your plan and on how your emails are set up. It is a scheduled message that goes out a set number of days before departure or check in, carrying your own branding and the details of the booking, so your customer is not left hunting through old emails on the morning of the trip. What goes into that reminder is usually the practical part of the booking, such as the travel dates, the flight or hotel details, the booking reference and anything the customer still has to do before they leave. You can adjust the wording so it sounds like your agency rather than a standard notice, and you can set how far ahead of travel it should go. If a booking is made very close to the departure date, there may not be enough time left for the reminder to be useful, so it may simply not go out. The reminder is only as accurate as the booking record it is built from. If an airline moves a flight and the change has come back into the portal, the reminder reflects it, but anything you have arranged by phone or outside the system will not appear unless you add it yourself. For anything unusual or sensitive, it is still worth contacting the customer directly. Ask which automatic messages are enabled on your account, then make a test booking and check that the reminder arrives looking the way you want it to.

Question 9

Can my customers reach my team from the portal itself if they get stuck while booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your portal can give travellers a way to reach you while they are still on the page, and it is one of the simpler things to set up. The usual options are a contact or enquiry form, a chat window in the corner of the screen, a request for a call back, or simply your own phone number and support hours shown clearly in the header and footer. Which of these you get depends on your plan and on what has been enabled for your account. Whatever you choose, the messages come to your team, not to anyone else, because the portal carries your brand throughout. It also helps to have the traveller's search or booking details travel with the message, so when someone writes in about a hotel or a fare, your agent can see what they were looking at instead of asking them to explain it again from the start. Be realistic about what this can do. A chat window only helps while somebody on your side is there to answer, so it is better to show honest support hours than to leave a chat sitting unanswered overnight. Live chat, call back requests and messaging app connections are not always part of a standard setup and may need extra arrangement, and any tool of this kind is only as good as the response time behind it. Decide first how you actually want customers to reach you and who will answer, then ask for that option to be enabled on your portal, and try it yourself as a traveller would to check the message arrives with your team quickly and with enough detail to act on.

Question 10

Can my customer book a flight that is leaving in a few hours, or is there a cut off?

Accepted Answer

Yes in most cases, though every airline sets its own cut off and once that point passes the flight simply stops appearing in the search results. Airlines usually close sales somewhere between one and a few hours before departure, and the exact moment differs by airline, by route and sometimes by the airport. Your portal does not decide this. It shows what the supplier returns at that moment, so a flight that was there at breakfast may quietly drop off the list by lunchtime. For international departures the cut off tends to be earlier than for domestic ones, because check in and boarding are longer. There is a second thing to watch on very late bookings, which is the time it takes for the ticket to actually be issued and reach the airline. Payment being taken is not the same as the passenger being ticketed, and on a rare occasion a booking made very close to departure can be accepted and then fail at the ticketing stage. That is why it is worth checking the booking on your portal rather than assuming, and telling the passenger to reach the airport early rather than just in time. If same day selling is a regular part of your business, ask which of your flight suppliers handle last minute issuing best, and make a habit of confirming that the airline reference has come through before you tell your customer to set off.