Does my customer get their hotel voucher straight away after they book, or do some hotels need to be confirmed first?

Yes, in most cases the voucher is ready straight away, but not for every hotel. The majority of rooms sold through hotel booking APIs are confirmed instantly, because the supplier already holds live availability for that room type. When your customer pays, the booking is sent, the hotel reference comes back within seconds, and the voucher can be emailed to them or downloaded from your booking records while they are still on the page.

A smaller number of rooms are what suppliers call on request. That means the supplier has to go back to the hotel and ask before the booking is certain. In that case your customer gets a pending confirmation rather than a voucher, and the final answer can take anything from a few minutes to a day or more depending on the hotel and the supplier. Whether a property behaves this way is set by the supplier, not by your portal, so it varies between connections and between seasons.

Your portal will show the status of each booking so you can see which ones are confirmed and which are still waiting, and the voucher becomes available as soon as the supplier confirms. Whether the pending status is also shown to the customer, and whether their card is charged immediately or held, depends on how your suppliers and your payment setup are configured, so it is worth agreeing that with us rather than assuming.

Before you go live, book a test room on each of your hotel connections and see how quickly the voucher appears, and ask us to set the wording your customers see on any booking that comes back as on request.