If my customer wants to change the dates on a hotel they already booked, can I do that on the portal or do I have to cancel and rebook?

In most cases you will need to cancel and rebook rather than edit the dates, because very few hotel suppliers allow a booking to be amended once it is confirmed. A hotel reservation is priced for the exact nights, room type and guest count you sent at the time of booking. When any of that changes, the supplier treats it as a different booking, so the portal has to release the original one and create a new one at whatever rate is available on the new dates.

Whether that is simple or painful depends entirely on the cancellation terms of the original booking. If the rate is refundable and you are still inside the free cancellation window, you can cancel, get the money back and rebook with very little fuss, although the new dates may cost more or less than the old ones. If the rate is non refundable, or the deadline has passed, cancelling means your customer loses what they paid, so it is usually worth contacting the supplier or the hotel directly to ask for goodwill before you cancel anything.

A small number of suppliers do support amendments through their API, and where that is the case the portal can pass the change through for you instead of forcing a cancel and rebook. This varies from one supplier connection to another, so it is not something we can promise across the board, and some changes such as correcting a guest name are more often accepted than a change of dates.

Before you cancel, open the booking on your portal and check the cancellation deadline and the rate terms, then look at the price on the new dates so you can tell your customer exactly what the change will cost them.