A travel agent website for agents who have never had one

What your week looks like without a travel agent website

A travel agent without a website answers the same five questions forty times a week, by hand. A customer asks about Lagos to Dubai in March. You open a search tool, find three options, screenshot them, crop the screenshots, type the prices with your markup added, and send the lot as a message.

Then the customer asks about a different week. You do it again. By the time they decide, one of the fares has moved and you redo the whole thing. Nothing you typed is saved anywhere a customer can go back to.

The rest of the week has the same shape. A family wants a hotel near the airport with a late check in, so you look up the policy and retype it. Someone wants to know if a fare can be changed, so you read the rules and summarize them in a message. Someone asks for your website and you send them your profile on a social app instead.

Two things are lost in that week. The first is time: most of what you retype is public information the customer could have read themselves. The second is trust. People who have never met you want to see a real business with a name, a domain and a checkout before they send money.

How your own booking site changes your day

Your own booking site moves the searching to the customer and leaves the advice to you. OTA Builder creates a travel booking website under your own brand, name and domain, selling flights, hotels and activities, and building it, running it and selling on it are free.

The morning looks different. The customer who wanted Lagos to Dubai searches it themselves on your site, at midnight, with the price calendar showing the lowest fare found for each day of the month. They see the price with your markup already in it. They book, they pay, and the e-ticket arrives by email with your site's name on the confirmation.

You stop being the search engine and start being the agent again. The messages you do answer are the ones worth answering: a complicated multi city routing, a group that needs two hotels in one city, a customer who wants to know which fare allows a change. Once you sign up, your site is live within one working day.

Dalia is a fictional travel agent invented for this page. She works from home in Nairobi and sells about 40 trips a month, almost all of them by message.

Round numbers, for illustration only:

• She sets a flat markup of $25 on flights and 8 percent on hotels.
• A return fare found at $500 shows on her site at $525.
• A four night hotel found at $400 shows at $432.
• A customer books both at once and pays $957 on Dalia's own site.

Before, those two bookings took Dalia about an hour of screenshots and retyping across three days. On her own site the customer does the searching, and Dalia's part is a five minute check of the passport names. The numbers above are illustrations, not a typical result.

Illustration only, not a typical result.

The three features that matter most to a working agent

Three parts of a travel agent website carry most of the weight for agents: flight search that goes deep enough to be useful, hotel results that show the full policy, and markup you set yourself.

Flight search that goes as deep as your questions

Flight search on your site covers one way, return and multi city. Results start arriving within seconds, duplicate offers are removed, and filters cover airline, stops and departure time on each leg. Refund and change rules are shown in results where the source provides them, so the question you usually answer by hand is answered on the page. A price calendar shows the lowest fare found for each day, and a live countdown shows how long a fare is held. Your site draws on supply from 1,000+ airlines. If you want the longer version of how this is put together, read how to create a flight booking website without coding.

A customer who can read the fare rules on the page asks you a better question when they do write in.

Hotels with the full policy on the page

Hotel search covers a whole city or one property, across 5,000,000+ hotels and properties. Each result shows room size, bed types, photos and full policies: the check in window, children, pets, meals and deposits. That is the block of text you currently copy into a message, and now the customer reads it before paying. After booking, the hotel voucher arrives by email with your site's name on it.

Your own markup, set by you

You add your own markup on top of the prices shown, and you keep it. Markup can be set for flights, hotels and activities, so a thin margin on a competitive route can sit next to a wider one on hotels. You can see your markup settings and your bookings in your account. How travel agencies make money on flights, hotels and activities walks through the arithmetic.

Starting from where you already are

You do not need to stop selling by message to start. Most agents put the site up first, keep working the way they always have, and send the link instead of a screenshot when the next quote request arrives. The customers who prefer to search on their own will use it without being asked.

You do not need a technical team, and you can change your brand name and colors any time. The full feature list covers what is in the site, pricing covers what is free and what the $99 per year bundle adds, and do you need IATA accreditation or a license to sell flights online covers the question most new agents ask next. If you work mostly by referral under your own name, the page for independent travel advisors is closer to your situation.