If my customer wants four rooms for a family travelling together, can I book them all in one go on my portal?

Yes, in most cases you can book several rooms in a single search and a single booking, as long as the supplier behind that hotel allows it. When your agent searches, they can set how many rooms are needed and how many adults and children are staying in each one, and the results come back priced for the whole party rather than for one room on its own. The guest names for each room are usually entered at the checkout stage.

There is a limit, though, and it is set by the supplier rather than by us. Most hotel suppliers only accept a small number of rooms in one request, so if your customer needs more than that, you may have to split the party across more than one booking. Larger blocks of rooms are often treated as group business by the hotel and are contracted directly rather than sold live through an API, so they may not appear in your search results at all.

It is also worth knowing that the rooms in one booking are not always independent of each other. Some suppliers let you mix room types in the same booking, while others want every room to be the same type. The cancellation terms usually apply to the booking as a whole, so removing just one room from a group of four may or may not be possible depending on who the supplier is.

Before you promise anything to a family or a group, run a test search for the number of rooms you expect to sell most often and see how your connected suppliers respond, then check the cancellation wording on the results you get back.