If my customer pays for a booking on my portal, does the money come to my own bank account or does it go through you first?

Yes, in most setups the money lands in your own bank account. A white label portal normally connects to a payment gateway that is registered in your own business name, so when a customer pays on your site, the funds settle directly with you under your own merchant agreement. We are not sitting in the middle holding your customer money.

The part that depends on you is the gateway itself. You need to open a merchant account with a payment provider that operates in your country and supports your currency, and you need to pass their checks before they will switch you live. Once you have that, we connect it to the portal using the keys they give you. Which gateways we can connect to depends on your plan and on what that provider allows, so it is worth telling us which one you have in mind before you sign up with them.

There is one thing to keep separate in your head. The money your customer pays you is your money, but the cost of the booking still has to reach the supplier, and that usually comes out of a deposit or credit arrangement you hold with the supplier or with us. So you collect retail at the front and settle wholesale at the back, and the gap between the two is your margin. Refunds also follow the same path, meaning a refund to the customer goes out from your gateway while the supplier credits you separately, and those two do not always happen on the same day.

Before you commit, check with your chosen payment provider what they charge per transaction and how many days they take to settle, then let us confirm we can connect to them.