Travel portal development company for the USA

Building a travel portal for the US market

The United States is the largest air travel market in the world, and it works differently from almost everywhere else. Ticketing settles through ARC rather than IATA BSP, four states run their own seller-of-travel registration schemes, advertising rules come from the US Department of Transportation, and travellers expect to pay by card with instant confirmation. A portal built from a generic template ignores all of that; a portal built for the US market treats it as the starting point.

We are a travel technology vendor, not a travel agency: we build and integrate the platform, and you sell on it under your own brand, your own supplier agreements and your own registrations. If you are comparing approaches, start with our main travel portal development page for the architecture, then use this page for what changes when the portal is aimed at US customers.

Seller-of-travel registration: know the four states

Four US states currently operate active seller-of-travel registration laws: California, Florida, Hawaii and Washington. These laws generally apply to businesses selling travel to residents of those states, not just businesses located there, which is why an online portal that accepts nationwide bookings usually has to think about all four. The regimes differ: California requires registration and consumer disclosures with a trust account or bond arrangement, Florida registers sellers of travel through its Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services with bonding requirements, Washington administers registration through its Department of Licensing, and Hawaii has its own travel agency law with trust account requirements.

We are developers, not lawyers, and registration is your responsibility: talk to a US travel attorney before launch. What we do is make compliance practical in the product itself: registration numbers displayed where each state expects them, state-specific disclosure text managed from the admin panel, and terms, refund and privacy pages wired into the booking flow rather than buried in a footer.

ARC or consolidator: two ticketing paths, two portal designs

How your portal issues tickets shapes how we build it, so we scope this before anything else.

Many US startups begin on the consolidator path because full ARC accreditation takes time and financial guarantees, then add direct GDS ticketing later. We build the supplier layer so that switching or mixing paths is a configuration change, not a rebuild.

GDS and NDC content in the US

Major US carriers have been moving fare content toward NDC channels for several years, and some fares and ancillaries are no longer available through traditional GDS EDIFACT feeds. In practice a competitive US portal now aggregates a mix: GDS content, NDC content where your access allows it, and consolidator fares. We handle the unglamorous part of that mix, normalising fare rules, baggage and change conditions across sources so your customers see one consistent result set. If your access runs through Sabre, our Sabre API integration service covers both classic and NDC-enabled APIs.

One honest caveat: what content you can access depends entirely on your own agreements with GDSs, airlines and consolidators. We integrate what you are entitled to; we do not resell inventory or provide access.

Payments the way US travellers expect

US travel is card-first. Portals we build for the US market take Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover through a US-friendly gateway such as Stripe, Authorize.net or Braintree, with wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay where the gateway supports them. Card data goes through the gateway's hosted fields or tokens, keeping your servers out of PCI scope as far as the architecture allows.

Travel is also a high-chargeback category in the US, so we build for disputes from day one: AVS and CVV checks, clear merchant descriptors, itineraries and terms emailed at booking, and an admin trail that gives you the evidence a dispute response needs. For advertising and pricing display, US DOT rules require the full price including mandatory taxes and fees to be shown, so our search results and booking pages display total prices rather than teaser base fares.

What we build for US agencies

• B2C booking portals - flight, hotel and package search on your domain with your markups; see flight booking whitelabel for the fastest route
• B2B agent portals - sub-agent logins, credit limits, agent-level markups and commission statements for consolidators and host agencies; see B2B travel portal
• Corporate booking tools - approval flows, traveller profiles and policy rules for TMCs
• Back office - queues, refunds, voids, sales reports and accounting exports shaped around ARC or consolidator settlement

How working with us from the US actually works

We will not pretend to have a US office: our team works from Gurugram, India. What we commit to is simple. Calls and demos are scheduled in your business hours, Eastern through Pacific, and you get a named project lead, a written scope, and progress you can see on a staging URL every week. India's time difference also has a practical upside: work you discuss in your afternoon is often ready for review the next morning. Contracts, invoicing and IP assignment are in writing before we start. [TO CONFIRM: invoicing currency and contract entity for US clients]

Process and timeline factors

1. 01

   Scope

   We map your ticketing path, suppliers, target states and payment setup, then give you a fixed written quote.

2. 02

   Design

   US-market UX: total-price display, card-first checkout, mobile-first search. You approve before build.

3. 03

   Build and integrate

   Portal, supplier APIs, gateway, markup engine and admin, with test bookings in supplier sandboxes.

4. 04

   Certify and launch

   Supplier certification where required, tracking, disclosure review pass, then launch on your domain.

Timelines depend mostly on supplier credential availability and certification queues, which sit with your suppliers rather than with us; we will give you a realistic schedule against your actual access, not a generic promise.