When my customer books a hotel on my portal, is it confirmed straight away or does the hotel have to accept it first?

In most cases it is confirmed straight away, but not always, and your portal will tell you which kind of rate you are looking at. The majority of hotel rates that come through a booking connection are sold on instant confirmation, which means the room is held the moment the payment goes through and a reference comes back within seconds. Your customer sees the confirmation on screen and the voucher reaches them by email without anyone at your agency having to do anything.

Some rates are sold on request instead. With these the supplier has to check with the property before the room is guaranteed, and that reply can take anything from a few minutes to the best part of a working day, depending on the hotel and the time of day where it is. During that wait the booking sits in a pending state on your portal rather than a confirmed one, and it can come back declined if the property has since sold the room. On request rates are more common with small independent properties, at busy times of year, and when someone is booking a lot of rooms at once.

The honest limit here is that the choice is not yours. Whether a given rate is instant or on request is decided by the supplier and the hotel, not by your portal, and it can differ between two rooms in the same property.

Make sure your staff know to look at the booking status rather than the payment before they promise a customer anything, and agree in advance what you will offer if an on request room comes back declined.