Do my customers have to create an account on my portal before they can book?

No, in most cases your customers can book as a guest without creating an account first. A white label portal will normally let someone search, pick a flight or a hotel, enter the traveller details and pay in one go, and the booking reference is then sent to the email address they typed in. Asking people to register before they can even see a price is one of the quickest ways to lose a sale, so guest booking is usually the default.

You can still offer an account as a choice rather than a rule. When a customer signs up, their traveller details and past bookings are saved, so repeat trips take less typing and they can look up their own booking later instead of ringing your office. Some agencies ask corporate clients to register, because the travel manager wants a record of everyone travelling from the company, and leave registration switched off on the public side of the site.

There are limits worth knowing about. Whether guest booking can be turned on or off, and how much of the sign up form you can change, depends on your plan and on how your portal has been set up for you. Card payments can also trigger extra checks from the payment provider, and some suppliers insist on full passenger details before they will confirm, so a guest booking is not always a very short form. Those rules sit with the supplier and the payment side rather than with the portal itself.

Decide which customers you want to register and which you would rather let through quickly, then check with us what your current setup allows before you change anything.