A B2B travel portal is a website and a set of APIs through which travel agents book flights, hotels and holiday packages for their own customers. B2B means business to business: the portal sells to agents, not to travellers. India has tens of thousands of small travel agents, in almost every town, and many of them book through such portals.
A small agent usually cannot sell airline tickets directly. Direct selling needs accreditation from IATA, the global association of airlines, a bank guarantee and access to a global distribution system (GDS). So a larger company, called a consolidator, connects once to the GDS and to the airlines. Many airlines now also send their offers directly over NDC. The consolidator then resells these fares to small agents through its portal.
On the portal, the agent sees a net fare, which is the price the agent pays. The agent then adds its own margin, called a markup, before quoting the customer. The portal shows both figures, so the agent can quote quickly.
Here is a typical case. A travel agent in Ludhiana has a family of four who want to visit Srinagar in June. He searches the portal for flights from Amritsar. He finds a fare of ₹6,200 per person, net. He adds ₹300 per person as his markup and quotes the family ₹26,000 for four tickets. He also adds a houseboat for two nights from the portal's hotel list. The family pays him in cash and by UPI. He pays for the booking from money he has already loaded into his portal account. This prepaid balance is called the agent's wallet. He tops it up through the portal's payment gateway. The tickets reach the family's phones within minutes, with his agency's name on them.
Some agents have their own website. They do not use the portal's screens. Instead, their website calls the portal's API. This means their website sends a search request to the portal's software and receives the fares back, ready to show on the agent's own pages.
The portal earns from the gap between what it pays the airlines and what it charges agents. It also receives incentives from airlines for the number of tickets it sells. An online travel agency sells to travellers directly. A B2B portal sells through agents, whom many families still prefer, because they know the agent and can call him when plans change. Some OTAs run a B2B portal as well. The same seat may be on sale on the portal and on travel sites at once, so every sale must close it everywhere, through multichannel inventory management.