Can my customers pay by card directly on my portal, or do I have to take the payment myself?

Yes, your customers can pay by card on your portal, as long as you have a payment gateway set up in your own name.

The way it normally works is that you open a merchant account with a payment gateway, and that gateway is then connected to your portal. When a customer pays, the money lands in your own account, not in anyone else's, and the booking carries on to the supplier from there. You can usually offer more than one way to pay at the same time, so an online customer pays by card while someone who walks into your office pays by bank transfer or cash and you mark that booking as paid yourself.

There are a few honest limits worth knowing. Which gateways you can use depends on where your business is registered and which providers actually operate in your country, and the gateway has to approve your account, which is their decision and not something we control. Travel is treated as a higher risk trade by some banks, so you may be asked for extra paperwork or for a reserve to be held back before you are approved. Separately, some airline and hotel suppliers want settlement at the moment of booking, so if you let a customer pay you later, you may still have to pay the supplier first and collect afterwards.

Before you go live, check with your bank or gateway that they are happy to take on a travel business, then decide which payment methods you want on the website and which ones you would rather handle offline, and let us know so we can switch them on for your portal.