Can I test the software with practice bookings before I start selling to real customers?

Yes, you can test the software with practice bookings before you go live. Most of the flight and hotel suppliers we connect to offer a test environment, sometimes called a sandbox, which behaves like the real one but does not issue a real ticket or a real hotel voucher and does not charge anyone. Your portal or your API keys can be pointed at that test environment first, so you and your staff can run searches, make bookings, cancel them and see how it all looks to a customer, without any money moving.

What you can test depends on the supplier. Some give a full test environment with a decent spread of sample flights and hotels, so almost everything you want to try will work. Others give a limited one where only certain routes, cities or dates return results, and a few do not offer test access at all and expect you to start on the live system. Payment gateways are usually similar, with a test mode that accepts dummy card details. So your test setup may look a little thinner than the real thing, and that is normal rather than a fault.

For that reason the usual approach is to do your learning and your staff training on test, then switch to live and make one small real booking yourself before you put the portal in front of customers. That first live booking is what proves the ticket, the voucher, the confirmation email and the payment all come out correctly, because test data cannot prove that for you. When you are ready, ask which of your connected suppliers have test access on your plan, and whether your payment gateway does too, so you know which parts you can rehearse and which you will only see once you are live.