Can my staff search for one particular hotel by name if the customer already knows where they want to stay?

Yes, in most cases your staff can search for a single named property instead of a whole city. The hotel booking API works from a list of properties, and each property carries its own reference in that list, so once your portal knows which hotel the customer means it can ask the supplier for that one property and come back with the room types and rates available for the travel dates, rather than a long page of results your agent then has to read through.

How this feels to use depends on how the search box on your portal is set up. The usual arrangement is that the same box which accepts a city also suggests hotel names as your agent types, so they can pick the exact property from the list. For that to work smoothly, the property list behind the portal has to be kept in step with the suppliers, because hotels open, close, change their names and change their owners, and a property one supplier carries may not be loaded by another.

Be prepared for the case where the hotel is found but no rooms come back. That can happen because your supplier does not contract that property at all, because it is genuinely full for those dates, or because the rates for it are limited to certain markets or booking conditions. If you buy from more than one supplier the portal can try each of them, but no portal can sell a property that none of your suppliers gives it.

Before you commit, ask to see a name search run live on a handful of the hotels your own customers ask for most often, using real dates, and watch what the portal shows when one of those hotels has nothing available.