Question 1

Will every hotel on my portal come with photos and a proper description, or do I have to add them myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the great majority of hotels arrive with photos, a description, an address and a facilities list already attached, and you do not have to type any of it. That content comes down from the supplier along with the room and rate information, so a hotel page fills itself in as soon as the property appears in a search. The quality of it, though, is only as good as what the supplier holds. Large chain hotels and popular city properties usually come with a full gallery and a well written description in more than one language. Small guest houses, new openings and properties in quieter destinations sometimes arrive with a thin description, a handful of pictures, or occasionally a single exterior shot. That is a gap in the supplier's own records rather than something wrong with your portal, and it can differ from one supplier to another for the very same hotel. Where it matters most to you, you can usually improve on what you are given. Hotels you have contracted yourself are yours to describe, so you can load your own photos and wording for those. For supplier hotels that you sell heavily, it is often possible to override the description or promote a better image so your page reads well, and this depends on your plan, so ask before you promise a client anything. A good next step is to search your top selling destinations, look at the first page of results as a customer would, and note any property that shows poor or missing images so you can decide whether to enrich it or push a stronger hotel ahead of it.

Question 2

Can I stop a particular airline or hotel from showing up in my portal's search results?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can hide specific airlines or properties so they never reach your customers. Agencies do this for all sorts of ordinary reasons, such as a hotel that has given them repeated service problems, an airline whose ticketing rules they would rather not handle, or a property they already sell on a direct contract and do not want appearing twice at a different rate. How the block is applied depends on where the results come from. Some supplier connections accept the exclusion at the search stage, so the unwanted option is never returned at all, which is the cleanest outcome and the fastest. Others send back everything they have, and the filtering happens on your side just before the list is drawn, which works equally well for the customer but means the option was fetched and then dropped. Be aware that a block is only as precise as the reference it is built on. Hiding one hotel is straightforward because it has its own identifier, but hiding an airline can also hide the connecting legs it operates on behalf of another carrier, and a chain wide block may catch properties you did not intend to lose. It is also worth remembering that anything you exclude is revenue you are choosing not to earn, so a broad rule can quietly cost you more than the problem it solves. Before you set one up, write down exactly what you want gone and why, then run a search you know would normally return it and confirm it has disappeared for your customers and not just for you.

Question 3

Can I book a large group of passengers on the same flight through my portal?

Accepted Answer

No, not in the normal way you would book a family or a couple of colleagues. Airlines treat a large party as a group booking, and group fares are quoted by the airline group desk rather than sold from the same live seat availability a portal searches. If you try to put a big party through an ordinary flight search, the portal will usually stop you at a limit set by the airline or the supplier, or it will split the party across different fares at different prices. What your portal handles well is everything under that limit. Small parties, families with children and infants, and a mix of passenger types can normally go through as one booking, on one reference, with one payment, and the names all sit together so seating and baggage stay tied to the same record. Where the exact cut off falls depends on the airline and on the supplier your portal is connected to, so it is not the same number everywhere. For anything larger, the usual practice is to contact the airline or your consolidator for a group quote, hold the seats under their group terms, and then record the booking in your portal so it appears in your sales and your customer history alongside everything else. Some suppliers can load a confirmed group booking back for you, and some cannot, so this part depends on who you buy from. If you regularly handle large parties, ask your flight supplier how they want group requests raised and how the finished booking should be recorded on your side.

Question 4

Can my portal produce a proper invoice for my corporate customers?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a portal can raise an invoice for a corporate customer, and for most agencies this is one of the first things worth setting up properly. Every booking that goes through your portal already carries the details an invoice needs, which is the traveller name, the dates, the supplier reference, what was charged and what your own charges were, so an invoice can be produced from that booking rather than typed out again by hand. You can normally set your company name, address and tax details once and have them appear on every invoice you issue. Where it gets more particular is the format your corporate client expects. Some companies want one invoice per traveller, some want a single monthly invoice covering everything their staff booked, and some want a cost centre or an employee reference printed on the document so their accounts team can match it. Most of that can be arranged, but it depends on the plan you are on and on how much you want the layout changed from the standard one. Tax is the part to be careful about. The way tax is shown on a travel invoice differs by country and sometimes by the type of product, and a flight is often treated differently from a hotel or a tour. Your portal can show the tax lines that come back from the supplier, but it cannot decide your local tax treatment for you, so this is worth confirming with your own accountant before you send the first invoice to a corporate client. Have a look at a sample invoice from a recent booking, show it to the client's accounts team, and tell us what they want changed before you go live with them.

Question 5

Can my portal search more than one flight supplier at the same time so my customer sees the cheapest fare?

Accepted Answer

Yes, a portal can search several flight sources at once and put the results together into a single list, so your customer compares fares in one place instead of you checking each supplier by hand. The search goes out to every source you have switched on, the replies come back, and duplicate flights are merged so the same journey does not appear twice at different prices. The honest limit is speed and coverage. Every extra source you add makes the search a little slower, because the page can only finish once the slower suppliers have answered, and a source that is having a bad day can time out and simply be left out of that search. Coverage also varies, since one supplier may have a fare on a route that another does not carry at all, so more sources usually means better prices but never a guarantee of the lowest fare in the market. How many sources you can run, and whether you can set an order of preference so one supplier is chosen when two fares match, depends on your plan and on what each supplier allows in their contract with you. Some suppliers are happy to sit alongside others, and some ask to be the only source on certain routes, so it is worth reading that part of the agreement rather than assuming. If fares matter more to you than search speed, start with two sources, watch how long your searches take and how often each supplier wins the sale, and add a third only once you are happy with the results.

Question 6

Can my customers book an airport transfer or a rental car on my portal along with their flight?

Accepted Answer

Yes, transfers and car rental can sit on your portal beside flights and hotels, so a customer who has just booked a trip can add the ride from the airport without leaving your site. They are searched and confirmed in the same way as a hotel, with the customer choosing a pick up point, a date and a time, and receiving a voucher they can show to the driver or the rental desk. How much choice they see depends entirely on which suppliers you are connected to for that product. Transfers and car rental come from different suppliers than flights, so having one live does not automatically bring the other. Coverage also varies a great deal by country and by airport, and a small regional airport may have very few options or none at all, which is not something your portal can create on its own. There are practical points worth knowing before you sell them. Car rental almost always requires a credit card in the driver's name at the counter, along with a licence, and the deposit is handled by the rental company rather than by you. For transfers, the flight number matters, because that is how the driver knows when to wait if the flight is late. The best next step is to ask which transfer and car suppliers your plan includes, then run a few test searches for the airports your customers actually fly into and see whether the results are good enough to sell.

Question 7

Can my customers see reviews and star ratings for a hotel before they book it on my portal?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your portal can show a star rating and some form of guest feedback, but how much of it you get depends on where the hotel comes from. The official star rating usually arrives with the hotel details from the supplier, so that part is normally there without you doing anything. Written guest reviews are a separate matter, because reviews belong to whoever collected them and not every supplier passes them on. Where reviews are not supplied, there are two honest ways forward. You can show only the star rating and the facilities, which is what many agency portals do, or you can collect your own feedback from customers who booked with you and show that instead. Your own reviews are slower to build up, but they are yours, they mention your service as well as the hotel, and nobody can take them away when you change supplier. Be careful about mixing sources on the same page. If one hotel shows a long list of reviews and the one next to it shows none, customers read that as the second hotel being worse, when really it is just a gap in the data. It is usually better to show the same kind of information for every property, even if that means showing less. The sensible next step is to look at a few hotels on your portal from different suppliers and see what actually appears under each one. That tells you quickly whether reviews are worth showing at all, or whether your effort is better spent on gathering your own.

Question 8

If I move to a new portal, can I bring my existing customer and booking records with me?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases your existing customer and booking records can be brought across, but how much comes over depends on what your current system will let you export. Customer contact records, agent logins, markup rules and past booking summaries are usually the easiest to move, because most systems can produce them as a spreadsheet or a data file. Once that file exists, each column is matched to the field it belongs in on the new portal and then loaded. Most of the effort goes into that matching, since two systems rarely name the same thing in the same way, so the export is normally checked with you before anything is brought in. Bookings that are still to travel need more care. A live booking sits with the airline or the supplier who holds it, so the record can be copied into your new portal so you can see it, but changes, cancellations and refunds on those older bookings usually still have to be handled where they were first made. Anything booked after you move over is fully managed inside the new portal. If your current provider will not give you an export at all, then only what you can copy out by hand can be moved, and it is much better to find that out early than on the week you switch. Before you fix a date for the move, ask your current provider in writing what export they will give you and in what format, and pass that to us so we can tell you honestly what will carry across and what will not.

Question 9

Can my customers cancel a booking themselves from my portal, or do they have to contact me first?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases they can, and you also get to decide whether you want to allow it. A white label portal normally gives every traveller a small account area where they can sign in, open a booking they have made and start a cancellation from there. If you would rather keep that in your own hands, the same portal can be set so the traveller only raises a request and nothing is cancelled until someone at your agency approves it. What actually happens after they click cancel depends on the supplier rules attached to that booking, not on the portal. A hotel rate with a free cancellation window will usually cancel straight away and return a confirmation. A non refundable rate, a special promotional fare or a ticketed flight often cannot be cancelled online at all, and the portal will say so rather than let the traveller think it has gone through. Airlines in particular tend to require the cancellation to go through their own process, and the refund, if any, follows their fare rules. Because of that mix, the safest setup for most agencies is to allow self service cancellation only where the supplier genuinely supports it, and to route everything else to your team as a request. That way your customer is never told a booking is cancelled when it is not, and you are not left arguing about a refund that was never actually processed. Before you switch this on, look at the cancellation rules for each product you sell and make one test booking of each type so you can see exactly what your customer will be shown.

Question 10

Can I hold a flight seat for my customer for a few hours before I actually issue the ticket?

Accepted Answer

Yes, with some airlines you can, but not with all of them, and the choice belongs to the airline rather than to you. Many full service carriers allow a booking to be created and held for a set period before payment is taken, and where that is offered your portal can create the booking and show you the deadline by which the ticket has to be issued. Low cost carriers almost never allow it, because their fare is only confirmed once the money is taken, so with those airlines the booking and the ticket happen together in one step. Where a hold is allowed, the way it works is straightforward. Your agent makes the booking as normal, the portal gives back a reference and a time limit, and nothing is charged yet. If you issue the ticket before that time limit passes, the booking is confirmed at the fare that was held. If the deadline goes by without ticketing, the airline cancels the booking at its own end and the seats go back into sale, so the reference you were holding is no longer of any use to you. It is fair to be honest about the limits. The hold period is set by the airline, and on a busy route it can be as short as a couple of hours. Some suppliers do not pass the hold facility through their connection at all, even for airlines that offer it when you book with them directly. Extras such as seats and baggage may also not be held until the ticket is issued. The sensible next step is to ask your supplier which of your airlines support holding a booking, and to keep a reminder against every held reference so that no ticket is lost to a deadline that quietly ran out.