If an airline's system is down when my customer searches, will my whole portal stop working?

No, one airline or one supplier going quiet does not take your whole portal down. When someone searches flights on your portal, the request goes out to every supplier you are connected to at the same time, and the portal shows whatever comes back in time. If one of them is slow or not answering, your customer still sees the results from the others, and the only difference is that the list has fewer options on it than usual. Your customers are not told which supplier is missing, so most of the time they will not notice anything at all.

What you may notice is the speed. Flight results are priced live by the airlines and suppliers, so a search is only ever as quick as they are, and heavy searches take longer because there is far more to price, for example long trips with several legs, large passenger numbers or open dates. Rather than leaving your customer watching a loading screen forever, the portal waits a set period and then shows what it has.

There is a real limit worth being honest about. If the supplier that carries most of your fares is having trouble, your results will look thin or empty for as long as that lasts, and nothing on our side can create fares that the supplier is not sending. The same applies at the final step, where a booking can still fail after a good search, because the fare and the seat are only certain once the airline accepts the request.

If you see empty or very short results, try the same search again a little later and check whether it is one route or everything, then send us the route and dates you used so we can see which supplier is at fault.