Question 1

Can my customers book a multi city trip on my portal, or only a simple return journey?

Accepted Answer

Yes, multi city trips can be searched and booked, not just a plain return. A multi city search lets your customer set out several legs in one go, flying into one city and home from another, or stopping in two or three places along the way, and the portal prices the whole journey as a single itinerary rather than as separate tickets stuck together. For a corporate traveller doing a run of meetings in different cities, this is usually cheaper and far easier to manage than booking each leg on its own. How many legs your customer can add, and whether every combination will actually price, depends on the supplier behind the search. Some flight sources handle long multi city journeys comfortably, others quietly limit how many legs they will accept or will only combine legs that stay within one airline or one alliance. If a route comes back empty, it is very often the supplier declining that particular combination rather than there being no flights at all. The one thing worth explaining to your customer is that a multi city booking behaves as one ticket. If they later want to change or cancel a single leg, the airline rules for the whole itinerary apply, and that is usually stricter and more expensive than it would have been on a separate booking. If you have a route your customers ask for often and it is not pricing well as a multi city search, send us the exact cities and dates so we can see which supplier is turning it away.

Question 2

Do my customers have to create an account on my portal before they are allowed to book?

Accepted Answer

No, they usually do not have to. Most portals allow a guest booking, where the customer enters the traveller details and pays without setting up a login, and the confirmation is sent to the email address they typed at the time. You can normally decide which way your own site works, so if you would rather every booking sat under a registered account, that can be switched on instead. There is a trade off either way. Guest booking removes a step and tends to lose fewer customers part way through paying, which matters most on a site where people are booking once and not coming back. An account gives the customer somewhere to see their trips, download a voucher again if they lost the email, and save traveller details for next time, and it gives your staff a cleaner history of who booked what. Many portals keep both, with the guest given the option to turn the booking into an account afterwards. What you cannot skip is the traveller information the supplier requires, and that is the same either way. Names as they appear on the passport, dates of birth where the fare needs them, and a contact email and phone number all still have to be collected, because they travel with the booking to the airline or the hotel. An account only decides whether those details are stored for reuse. The next thing to do is look at the booking settings on your portal, decide whether guest booking suits the customers you actually get, and place one test booking each way so you can see what the customer receives in both cases.

Question 3

When my customer books a hotel on my portal, is it confirmed straight away or does the hotel have to accept it first?

Accepted Answer

In most cases it is confirmed straight away, but not always, and your portal will tell you which kind of rate you are looking at. The majority of hotel rates that come through a booking connection are sold on instant confirmation, which means the room is held the moment the payment goes through and a reference comes back within seconds. Your customer sees the confirmation on screen and the voucher reaches them by email without anyone at your agency having to do anything. Some rates are sold on request instead. With these the supplier has to check with the property before the room is guaranteed, and that reply can take anything from a few minutes to the best part of a working day, depending on the hotel and the time of day where it is. During that wait the booking sits in a pending state on your portal rather than a confirmed one, and it can come back declined if the property has since sold the room. On request rates are more common with small independent properties, at busy times of year, and when someone is booking a lot of rooms at once. The honest limit here is that the choice is not yours. Whether a given rate is instant or on request is decided by the supplier and the hotel, not by your portal, and it can differ between two rooms in the same property. Make sure your staff know to look at the booking status rather than the payment before they promise a customer anything, and agree in advance what you will offer if an on request room comes back declined.

Question 4

Can I see which member of my team made or changed a particular booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a booking made through your portal is normally stamped with the staff login that created it, and later actions such as a cancellation or an amendment are recorded against whoever carried them out, with the date and time. You will usually find this on the booking itself, in a history or activity section, rather than in the main sales reports, so it is there when you need to settle a question about who did what. How much detail that history holds varies. The fact that a booking was cancelled and by whom is almost always kept. Whether you can see the exact values before and after a change, such as an old date next to the new one, depends on how your portal records amendments. Bookings that come in from the public side of your website will show as customer bookings rather than staff ones, because nobody in your office touched them. One thing worth being firm about is shared logins. If several people sit at the same desk and use one account, the history will only ever name that account, and the trail stops being useful the moment you actually need it. Giving every member of staff their own login costs you nothing in effort after the first setup and is the single thing that makes this record worth having. Open a recent booking in your admin area and look for the history or activity tab, and if you find staff names missing there, check whether anyone is still sharing a login before you go further.

Question 5

If my customer's payment goes through but the ticket does not get issued, does my portal still hold the booking?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the booking is not simply lost. Taking the payment and issuing the ticket are two separate steps, and when the second one fails the portal keeps the booking in a pending or failed ticketing state instead of throwing it away. It stays visible in your admin panel with the passenger details, the flight and the payment against it, so nothing has to be typed again from scratch. From there you normally have two ways out. You can try issuing again, which often works if the failure was a brief problem at the supplier's end rather than a fare that has gone. If the fare has genuinely disappeared, you either rebook the customer on what is available now and settle the difference with them, or you cancel and refund the payment you have already taken. The honest part is that neither outcome is guaranteed by the portal alone. Whether a retry succeeds depends on the airline and the supplier, and on whether that fare still exists at that moment, which can be minutes rather than hours. How quickly a refund reaches the customer depends on your payment provider and their card issuer, not on your portal, so a customer who sees the money leave their account may wait a while before it comes back. The practical habit is to look at the pending and failed ticketing list in your admin panel at the start of every day, and to call the customer yourself before they call you, because a booking sitting in that state overnight is the one that turns into a complaint.

Question 6

Can my staff use the portal on a mobile phone when they are away from the office?

Accepted Answer

Yes, your staff can work from a mobile phone. The booking screens adjust to the size of the screen they are opened on, so a phone browser shows the same search, the same results and the same booking form that a laptop does, only stacked into a narrower layout. Your team signs in with the login they already use at the desk, and anything they do on the phone appears straight away for everyone else on the account. Some jobs sit better on a phone than others. Running a search, checking a booking, pulling up a voucher and passing it on to a customer all work comfortably on a small screen. Longer jobs, such as typing passenger details for a large group, putting a package together or working through a refund, tend to be quicker on a laptop simply because there is more room to see everything at once. Nothing is blocked on a phone, it is a question of what is pleasant to do there. Be aware of two honest limits. Whether you also get a separate mobile app on top of the browser depends on your plan, so that is worth confirming rather than assuming. And a few screens that open inside the portal come from the supplier rather than from us, which means they follow the supplier's own layout and may not adapt as neatly on a narrow screen. Open the portal in the browser on your own phone and walk through a normal search and booking exactly as your staff would, and let us know if any screen feels awkward so we can take a look at it.

Question 7

Can my customers book flights for children and infants on my portal, or only for adults?

Accepted Answer

Yes, children and infants can normally be booked. When your customer starts a search they choose how many adults, children and infants are travelling, and the supplier returns fares for each of them rather than charging the adult price for everybody. During the booking your staff or your customer will be asked for the date of birth of the younger passengers, because that is what decides which fare applies. There are a few things to be aware of. An infant is usually expected to travel on an adult's lap, and if the family wants a separate seat for the baby the child fare is normally used instead, which costs more. Age is judged at the date of travel, not at the date of booking, so a child who has a birthday during a long trip may need to be booked differently on the return. Exactly how an airline handles this, and how many infants one adult may travel with, is set by the airline and it does vary. One thing that generally cannot be done through a portal is a child flying on their own. Most airlines treat an unaccompanied minor as a special service that has to be arranged with them directly, with forms and an escort at both airports, so a booking like that usually needs a phone call rather than a screen. When you set up, run a test search for a family with an infant and see what your suppliers return, and ask them what their rule is for unaccompanied minors so you know what to tell a parent who asks.

Question 8

Can my portal remember a repeat customer's details so my staff do not have to type them in again every time?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a portal can keep a saved profile for each traveller, so the second booking takes far less typing than the first. Once a customer has booked with you, your staff can pull up that person by name and the passenger form fills in with what was stored earlier, which usually means the full name as it appears on the passport, the date of birth, the contact details and any frequent flyer number you recorded. This saves real time on corporate accounts and on families who travel together, because the whole party can be saved as a group and added to a new booking in one go. Past bookings sit under the same profile, so an agent taking a call can see where that customer went last and what they usually choose, without hunting through email. There are honest limits. Passport numbers and expiry dates are sensitive information, and the rules in your country decide how long you are allowed to keep them and whether you need the traveller to agree first, so this is worth confirming rather than assuming. A saved passport can also expire quietly between trips, and a few suppliers insist on the document details being entered fresh at the time of ticketing rather than accepting a stored copy. Card details are a separate matter and are normally held by the payment provider, not by you. Before you rely on saved profiles, ask your provider what a profile is allowed to hold on your plan, and put a simple habit in place where your agent confirms the passport expiry with the customer on every booking rather than trusting what is on the screen.

Question 9

Do my customers get the airline's own booking reference so they can check the trip with the airline directly?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases they do. A flight booked through your portal carries two references, the one your own system gives the booking so that you and your staff can find it, and the airline's own reference for the same trip. The airline reference is the one a passenger can type into the airline's website to see their seats, their baggage allowance or their check in. Both normally appear on the confirmation the passenger receives and on the booking page inside your portal, along with the ticket number once the ticket has actually been issued. It is the ticket number, not the reference, that proves the seat is paid for, so it is worth teaching your staff to look for it before they tell a customer that everything is confirmed. There are a few limits to be aware of. Not every airline works the same way, and some low cost carriers use a booking format that behaves differently on their own site. What the passenger is allowed to do with that reference is decided by the airline and by the fare you bought, so an airline may let them add a bag but refuse a date change because the ticket was bought through an agent. There is also a practical risk, which is that if a passenger changes something directly with the airline, your portal will not know about it and your records will fall out of step. The sensible step is to check that your confirmation email shows both references clearly, and to tell your customers to come to you first before they change anything with the airline themselves.

Question 10

Can I put the booking search on my existing website instead of building a whole new one?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can keep the website you already have and add the booking search to it, rather than starting again from scratch. Agencies who have spent years building up their pages and their traffic usually prefer this, and there is no reason to throw that away just to start selling online. There are two common ways it is done. Either a search panel sits on one of your existing pages, so a visitor types in their dates and travellers right there, or your menu carries a link that opens the booking section on its own address under your own name. In both cases the results, the passenger details and the payment pages carry your logo and your colours, so the visitor feels they never left you. Which of the two suits you depends mostly on how your current site is built and how much of it you want to leave untouched. Be aware of a few limits. Some website builders do not allow you to add anything beyond their own blocks, and in that case the linked version is the practical choice. The styling can be matched closely to your site, but it will not always be identical down to every font and spacing. What you can change also depends on the plan you are on. The useful thing to check first is what your current website is built on and whether the person who looks after it can add a small block to a page, because that one answer decides which of the two routes is open to you.