Question 1

When I book a hotel through your API, do I get the confirmation number straight away or does my customer have to wait?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases the confirmation comes back straight away. For the large majority of rooms sold through a hotel booking API, the supplier holds live contracted stock, so when your booking request goes through successfully the response includes a booking reference and the hotel's own confirmation number within seconds. You can hand your customer a voucher the same minute they pay. The exception is what the industry calls on request stock. Some hotels, often smaller properties or rooms during very busy periods, do not confirm automatically. The booking goes through as a request and the hotel has to accept it before it becomes real. How long that takes is entirely up to the hotel and the supplier you are connected to, so we cannot promise a fixed waiting time. It can be minutes or it can be the best part of a day. What the software does is make the difference obvious rather than leave you guessing. Every booking carries a status, so you can see at a glance whether it is confirmed or still pending, and the status updates once the supplier comes back. Our advice is simple, do not send your customer a voucher while a booking is still pending, because if the hotel declines it you will have to go back to them and find something else. Before you start selling, look at the booking status on a few test bookings so your staff recognise the difference, and ask us which of the suppliers on your plan carry on request stock so you know what to expect.

Question 2

If my staff spell a passenger's name wrong on a ticket, can I correct it in the system after the ticket is issued?

Accepted Answer

Not reliably, because a name on an issued ticket is controlled by the airline and not by our software. Some carriers will accept a minor spelling correction, some will accept one only before departure and with a fee, and some will not change a name at all once the ticket is live. In that last case the only route is to cancel and reissue, which on a non refundable fare can mean losing what your customer paid. So the honest answer is that correcting a name is a request we pass to the airline, not a button that always works. What the portal does give you is a clear place to raise it. You can open the booking, see the ticket status and the passenger details as they were sent, and submit a correction request against that booking so there is a record of what was asked and when. Where the airline or the supplier behind the fare offers an automated change, the request can go through without anyone picking up the phone. Where they do not, it becomes a manual request and the timing depends on the airline, so we cannot promise a turnaround. The better protection is to stop the mistake reaching the ticket. The passenger details screen is the last point where the name is still yours to fix, and for repeat travellers the saved profile means the name is typed once and reused. Asking staff to read the name off the passport rather than off an email or a phone message catches most of these. If you have a wrong name right now, raise the correction as soon as you notice it rather than waiting, and check the fare rules on that booking so you know whether a reissue is even possible before you tell your customer anything.

Question 3

If my customer wants to cancel a hotel booking, can I do that in the software or do I have to ring the hotel myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can cancel a hotel booking from inside the software or by sending a cancel request through the API, without having to contact the hotel directly. The request goes to the supplier that gave you the rate, and when they accept it you get a cancellation reference back and the booking status updates so your records and your customer's record both show it as cancelled. Before you confirm the cancellation you can normally see what it will cost. The booking carries its cancellation policy and deadline with it, so the software can tell you whether you are still inside the free cancellation window or whether a penalty will apply. It is worth checking that screen with the customer on the phone, because once the cancellation goes through it cannot be undone and the room may not be available again at the same rate. There are real limits, and they come from the supplier rather than from us. Fully non refundable rates often cannot be cancelled at all, and the supplier will either refuse the request or return the full charge as the penalty. Some suppliers also handle very late cancellations, same day cancellations or no shows as a manual case, which means our support team or you may have to raise it with them rather than it happening instantly. How quickly any refund reaches your customer depends on the supplier and on how the booking was paid for. The next thing to do is open one of your recent hotel bookings and look at the cancellation policy and deadline shown against it, so you know what your staff will see when a customer asks.

Question 4

Will I be told if the airline changes the flight time after I have already issued the ticket?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you will be told, but how quickly and how reliably the message reaches you depends on the airline and on the supplier the fare came from. When an airline moves a departure, changes an aircraft or cancels a service, it sends a change message back against the booking. Where that message is passed on to us, we can show it on the booking record in your dashboard and send an alert to your team so somebody can act on it. Full service airlines booked through a main distribution source are generally good about sending these messages. Many low cost carriers work differently and simply email the contact address held on the booking, so if your agency address was used, the notice lands with you rather than the customer, and if the customer's address was used it may reach them before it reaches you. It is worth deciding at the start which address goes on bookings, because that single choice decides who hears first. Be aware of what a change notice does and does not do. It tells you what has changed, not automatically what your customer is owed. Accepting the new timing, moving the passenger to a different flight or asking for a refund follows the airline's own rules, and for some airlines that still means a manual request rather than something handled in one step through the connection. Very late changes on the day of travel can also reach the passenger at the airport before any message reaches your office. Check with us which of the airlines on your connection send change messages through, and make sure the right people in your team are set to receive those alerts.

Question 5

Can I trust that a hotel room showing in my search results is definitely still available to book?

Accepted Answer

Not always, and it helps to understand why so you can set the right expectation with your customers. Hotel search is built for speed, so most suppliers answer a search from a regularly refreshed store of rates rather than calling every hotel fresh for every enquiry. In the time between that refresh and the moment you go to book, the last room can be sold by someone else, the hotel can close out that rate, or the supplier can pull the offer. The room really was there when the search ran, the situation simply changed. This is why a sensible booking flow checks a second time before anyone pays. Before the booking is confirmed, the chosen room and rate are put back to the supplier to be revalidated, and if the room has gone or the price has moved you are told at that point rather than after the customer's card has been charged. How current the first set of results is varies by supplier, as some return live availability and others work from cached rates, so the behaviour you see will differ between the connections on your account. When a room does drop out, the practical answer is to show the customer a clear message and put the nearest alternatives in front of them straight away, whether that is another room type in the same hotel or a similar property on the same dates. Most of the time something suitable is still there, and the booking is saved if the customer is not left staring at an error. Worth checking with us which of your hotel suppliers give live availability and confirming that your site handles a failed room gracefully with alternatives rather than a dead end.

Question 6

Can I tell from the flight search results whether a fare is refundable before I book it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can, although how much detail you get depends on the airline and the type of fare. Most flight search results come back with a marker showing whether the fare is refundable, non refundable, or changeable for a fee, and that marker can be shown right next to the price on your site so your staff and your customers can see it before anyone commits. For the full picture there is usually a separate step that pulls the airline's own fare rules for the exact fare you have chosen. Some airlines send this back in a tidy, structured form with the change and cancellation conditions clearly separated, which means you can display them neatly on your quote or checkout page. Others send back long blocks of legal text written for ticketing staff, and all you can really do is show it as it is. Low cost carriers often keep it very simple and just tell you the fare cannot be refunded at all. Be aware that the refundable marker describes the fare family, not a promise about what will happen in a particular case. What a customer actually gets back can depend on how close to departure they cancel, whether any part of the journey has been flown, and the airline's policy at that moment. Even on a non refundable ticket some taxes may come back. A firm figure is normally only available at the point you actually request the cancellation. When you set up your portal, compare a refundable and a non refundable fare side by side in testing, then decide where on your pages that status should appear so nobody books the wrong one by accident.

Question 7

Can I connect more than one hotel supplier to my website and show all their rooms together in one search?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can run more than one hotel supplier behind the same search and show the results together in a single list, so your customer never sees that the rooms came from different places. Your site sends one search, each connected supplier is asked at the same time, and the replies are merged and sorted before the page is shown. There are honest limits worth knowing before you plan around this. You normally need your own agreement and your own login credentials with each supplier you want to use, because the contract and the rates belong to you, not to us. Whether a particular supplier can be added depends on whether we already support it and on your plan, and bringing in a brand new one usually means some setup work and testing first, so it is not always something that can be switched on the same week. The other thing to expect is overlap. The same hotel often comes back from two suppliers at once, so the system tries to match those records and show the property once with the better rate attached. That matching works well for most large and well known hotels, but it is never perfect, so you may occasionally see the same small guesthouse listed twice or a match that is missed. Search speed also matters, since the page can only finish once the slowest supplier has answered. The best next step is to write down which hotel suppliers you already hold contracts with, then ask us to confirm which of those we can connect and roughly how long each would take to set up.

Question 8

Can I show my customer a seat map and let them pick their seat when I book a flight through your API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, for many airlines you can, but how complete the seat map is depends on the airline and on the channel the fare comes through, so it will not be available on every flight you sell. In practice it works like this. Once your customer has chosen a flight and you have entered the passenger names, your site can call for the seat map for each leg of the journey. Where the airline shares it, you get back the cabin layout showing which seats are free, which are already taken, and which ones carry a charge. Your customer picks a seat, and the choice is added to the booking along with any fee before the ticket is issued. Low cost carriers are usually good about this because seats are a big part of what they sell. Some full service carriers only release seat maps on certain booking channels, and flights operated by a partner airline under a codeshare often return nothing at all, in which case the sensible thing is to let the booking go through without a seat and sort it out with the airline afterwards. It is also worth being clear with your customer that a seat is a request rather than a promise. A seat that looked free during the search can be gone by the time you confirm, and airlines move people around when they change aircraft type, so you can lose a seat you paid for. Paid seat charges are usually not refundable from the airline even when that happens. The best next step is to try the seat map call in the test environment on the specific airlines and routes you sell most, and decide what your booking page should show when no map comes back.

Question 9

Can my customers search for hotels near a particular area or landmark through your hotel booking API, or only by city name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, in most cases you can search by area or landmark and not only by city name. A hotel search request will usually accept either a city reference or a set of map coordinates with a search radius around them, which means you can centre the search on an airport, a railway station, a beach, a hospital or a well known landmark and bring back the properties around that point. Many searches also return the distance from the point you searched, so you can sort the results by what is nearest and show that on your page. How well this works does depend on the supplier content behind the search and on the plan you are on. Some suppliers describe neighbourhoods and districts very carefully, while others only give you the city and the coordinates of each hotel, so a named district search may be reliable in big cities and patchy in smaller towns. If you want to offer your own list of landmarks, you will often need to build that list yourself from the static hotel content and store the coordinates for each place you want to sell, rather than expecting every supplier to recognise the name your customer types. It is also worth remembering that a radius search is a circle on a map, not a local person's idea of where an area begins and ends, so a wide radius can pull in hotels your customer would not really call nearby. Keeping the radius sensible and showing the distance clearly usually solves this. The next step is to run a few test searches around the areas and landmarks you sell most often, compare the results against what you already know on the ground, and ask us which search methods are available on your plan before you design your search page.

Question 10

Can I hold a seat on a flight for my customer for a day or two without paying for it through your API?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes yes, but it depends entirely on the airline and the fare you have selected. Many full service carriers allow you to create a booking and hold the seats until a ticketing deadline, and where that is possible the API returns the booking along with its deadline so your staff can see exactly how long they have to collect payment. Low cost carriers almost always need payment at the moment of booking, so there is no hold option on those fares at all. Where a hold is allowed, the length varies by airline, route and fare type. Some airlines give you only until a set time on the same day, others allow a day or longer. That deadline is set by the airline, not by us, and it is often shorter during busy travel periods or when departure is close. The held fare is not always protected either, so if the airline withdraws that fare before you issue the ticket, you may have to reprice before you can complete the booking. If the deadline passes without payment, the airline usually cancels the booking by itself, which is why the software can display these deadlines alongside your bookings so nothing quietly disappears. Whether you see hold options in the first place also depends on which supplier connections are enabled on your plan, as some content only supports instant ticketing. Before you promise a customer a hold, check with us which of your connections support it, and always read the ticketing deadline returned on that specific booking rather than relying on what the airline normally allows.