HolidaySG B2B Travel Partner Program: What It Includes

I have sat on both sides of this conversation. For years I was the person on a small agency's phone at nine at night, trying to piece together a Singapore stopover for a family of six from five different supplier portals, each with its own login, its own payment rules and its own idea of what "confirmed" means. These days I mostly write about travel, but the agents I speak to still describe the same headache: too many tabs, too many top-ups, too many emails that say almost the same thing.

This guide is a plain walkthrough of the HolidaySG partner programme for travel businesses. It covers who it is for, what is actually inside the portal today, how the wallet works, what the ferry, hotel and quotation tools do, how the API fits in, how to apply, and how to run your first week without tripping over avoidable problems. I have tried to be careful with claims. Where something is decided on your partner record rather than on a public page, I say so, and I do not quote a rate or a commission figure that I cannot stand behind. If a number matters to your business, ask the partnerships team and get it in writing.

What the partner programme is, in plain words

The HolidaySG B2B Travel Partner Program is a business account for companies that sell travel to other people. You apply once, a person reviews your documents, and when the account goes live you sign in to a partner portal. Inside it you see inventory at your own partner rate, you put it in a cart, and you pay from a wallet balance or by card. Everything you book appears in a bookings list, and everything that moves in your wallet appears on a statement.

That sounds simple, and in daily use it is, but it helps to be clear about what the programme is not. It is not a consumer website with a discount code stapled on. The prices you see inside the portal are your prices, set on your partner record, and they are not the prices shown to the public. It is also not a place where you choose your own margin on the application form. Your margin, your payment terms and your commission group are set by HolidaySG after your application is reviewed, and they depend on the market you sell in and the volume you do. I will come back to this, because it is the single most misunderstood part of any reseller arrangement.

The programme was built around a small number of ideas. One account per company, with colleagues added as staff. One wallet to fund purchases. One place to see bookings, history and reports. One set of tools for the things agents keep asking for: ferries, hotels, quotations, packages and, for technical teams, a machine-to-machine API. Nothing here is exotic. The value is that these pieces sit behind one login and share one balance.

Who it is really for

The companies that get the most from a programme like this tend to fall into a few groups, and it is worth being honest about which one you are in before you apply.

Travel agencies with a counter or an online storefront are the obvious fit. You already sell packages, and Singapore is a destination you are asked about weekly. Having attraction tickets, ferry crossings and hotel searches on one account removes the part of the job that is pure admin.

Tour operators and destination management companies are the second group. You are building multi-day programmes for groups, and the quotation tool matters more to you than any single ticket. You will probably spend most of your time in the Tour Package Builder and the packages area.

Freelance consultants and small online sellers are the third. If you work from a laptop and sell to friends of friends and a growing social following, the appeal is that you do not need a contract with a dozen suppliers. You need one that is reliable. Small operators sometimes assume programmes like this are only for large firms. In my experience the reverse can be true, because a small seller feels every hour lost to chasing a supplier.

Corporate travel teams and visa consultants round out the list. A corporate desk moving staff between Singapore and Batam cares about ferries and a clean statement. A visa consultant cares about the visa side of the business, and about being able to point clients to accurate information on requirements.

If you are a one-off traveller planning your own holiday, this is not the right door. The public website is. The partner portal is built for people who book repeatedly for others and want records that reflect that.

What is inside the portal today

Rather than describe a wish list, I will list what exists at the time of writing. The table below is the structure of the portal as it works now.

Notice what is absent from that list. There is no promise of every product in the world, no claim of a fixed discount and no mention of airline ticketing. The programme sells attraction tickets, tours, ferries, hotel stays through the portal, and visa related services, with a quotation tool wrapped around them. That focus is a strength. It is easier to rely on a platform that tells you precisely what it does.

The wallet: how money moves

Most agents I know have been burned at least once by a payment arrangement they did not fully understand, so I want to spend real time on this.

The model is a prepaid balance. You top up your wallet, and your purchases draw it down. Every movement, whether a top-up, a booking debit or an adjustment, appears on your statement. That is the whole idea, and the benefit is plain: you always know what has been spent and you can reconcile it against your own books without guessing.

There is also the option to pay by card at checkout, which is useful when you are working with a balance that has run low and a customer is waiting. Cards are handled with a verification step, and I would not build a workflow around the expectation that a card payment will always go through without a second look. If you plan to rely on card payments for large bookings, speak to the partnerships team about what to expect on your account.

A few habits make wallets work well in practice.

Keep a working float rather than topping up for each booking. Topping up in small repeated amounts creates a statement full of tiny lines and a finance team that dislikes you. Pick a sensible float for a typical fortnight and refresh it on a schedule.

Reconcile weekly, not at the end of the quarter. The statement is designed to be read. Download it, tick it against your booking list, and flag anything odd while the details are still fresh.

Separate the person who tops up from the person who books where you can. In a small team this is not always possible, but the staff permissions in the portal let you limit who can do what, and it is a cheap safeguard.

Finally, understand that the wallet is a payment tool, not a savings account. Treat the balance as money you intend to spend on bookings, and ask how any unused balance is handled before you fund it with a large amount.

Ferries to Batam and beyond

Singapore to Batam is the crossing agents ask about more than any other, and it is the classic example of a product where a clean process beats a clever one. Group desks, corporate travel teams and tour operators building Indonesia extensions all lean on it.

In the portal, ferry search runs against live sailings. The crossing you pick is priced on the server at your partner rate, and payment comes from your wallet. The detail I like most is that the price is worked out on the server and not taken from the page. The price shown at checkout is the price the system uses, and it cannot be nudged by an edited form field. For an agent, that means fewer surprises and fewer disputes about what a quote said.

Some practical advice for ferry bookings, learned the hard way.

Passport details are required for each traveller, and they must match the travel document exactly. Spellings, order of names and expiry dates are where most problems start. Collect them as a copy of the passport page and not from memory or a message typed on a phone.

Check the terminal. Singapore has more than one departure point for the Batam crossing, and the listings are not interchangeable. Confirm the terminal with your client before you book and write it into the itinerary in plain words.

Allow a margin on arrival. Ferry terminals involve immigration on both sides, and the time between "arrive at the terminal" and "on the boat" is longer than people expect, especially with a group or on a public holiday weekend.

Keep your client informed about what happens after payment. A booking that is paid and confirmed is a different state from a booking that is paid and waiting to be confirmed, and the portal shows you which one you are in. Tell your client the same thing. Nobody enjoys being told a ticket is confirmed and then finding out it was not.

If your clients are sold on Batam as a day trip rather than just a crossing, the products in the catalogue include tours as well as plain ferry tickets, and you can combine them in a single quotation. That is where the next section comes in.

Hotels inside the same wallet

Hotels in the portal work against your wallet balance, which keeps the finance picture simple: one balance, one statement. You search with dates, you choose a room, and you book.

Two points deserve a mention. First, the guest nationality matters. Hotel suppliers use it to decide which rates and rules apply, so it is asked on every search and should be the real nationality of the guest, not a default you type to save time. Second, taxes and fees that are collected at the hotel are shown separately from the room price and are not folded into it. That is a good thing, because it keeps a quote honest, but you should tell your client early that some amounts may be payable at the property.

Hotels are also the product where details matter most to the guest experience. Check-in times, bed configuration, breakfast inclusions and any extra policies are shown on the booking page. Read them. If a family of five needs two connecting rooms, say so before you book and not after the voucher is issued.

Tour Package Builder: quotations that look professional

Of everything in the portal, the Tour Package Builder is the tool I would show a sceptical agent first. It lets you assemble a multi-day plan for a client, day by day, with tickets priced at your partner rate, and share the result as a link or as a PDF.

The important rule is stated plainly in the description: it produces quotations only. It does not charge a card and it does not make a booking. That separation is deliberate. A quotation is a conversation starter, and you want to be able to produce ten of them for ten potential clients without any of them touching a payment system.

Here is how I would use it in a real week.

Start from the client, not the product list. Ask who is travelling, in what ages, with what energy, and for how many nights. A couple on a honeymoon and a family with a toddler and a grandparent are building two different trips, even if they will end up at some of the same places.

Anchor each day with one big item and leave room around it. A day with a major attraction in the morning and nothing hard-scheduled for the afternoon is a day your client will enjoy. Cramming four ticketed activities into one day looks great on a quotation and miserable on the ground.

Share the client version, not the internal one. The client-facing link and the priced PDF show the total and the per-person figure. They do not show the net item prices or your markup. Use the internal costing view yourself, and keep it to yourself.

Revise instead of restarting. Clients change their minds about dates and about whether to add a day trip. Editing an existing plan is faster than rebuilding it, and it keeps your versions tidy.

The table below shows how I think about the day-by-day structure when I build a Singapore programme for a first-time visitor group.

None of this is a rule, and good agents will rearrange it for every client. What the table shows is the rhythm I aim for: one big thing a day, soft edges, and a rest built in.

Packages and distribution

If the Tour Package Builder is about quoting, the packages area is about structure. You can create your own packages, and you control which products you distribute. That second part is the one I find useful for agencies with several sales channels. You might offer a short list to walk-in customers, a broader list to corporate clients and a narrow set to a sub-agent who only sells one kind of trip.

Packages let you give your offering a shape that belongs to you. A "Singapore family five days" package is something you can name, describe and present in your style. The inventory inside it is live, and the prices follow your rates.

The thing to keep in mind is that a package is a promise to your customer. If one of its components becomes unavailable, you will be the person who has to explain why. Build packages from well-established attractions and check them regularly. Some tickets are seasonal, and the same attraction can offer different options at different times of year. The builder handles some of that by switching to a comparable on-sale option, but you should still read the final plan before it goes out.

Staff, sub-agents and keeping control

A partner account belongs to a company. People inside the company get their own logins, and sub-agents who sell on your behalf can have theirs too, each with permissions you control. This is one of those features that is boring until the day it matters.

When a colleague leaves, you remove their access without changing a shared password. When you bring on a sub-agent, you decide what they can see. When a mistake is made, you can see whose login made it, and that makes the conversation about fixing the mistake much easier than a conversation about who might have done it.

There is a rule worth stating firmly: one account per company. Colleagues are added under Staff rather than applying separately. If a second person from the same company applies for a second account, expect the application to be refused. This protects everyone, because it keeps balances, statements and rates attached to one business and not scattered across several.

On security, the portal asks for an email code when a new device signs in, and you are alerted when a device you have not used before gets in. If you receive an alert and it was not you, treat it seriously and tell the partnerships team. Business documents you upload at application time are stored privately and are visible only to HolidaySG admin staff.

Connecting your own systems with the API

Not every partner wants to click through a portal. If you run your own website or a back-office system, you can generate API keys inside the portal and sell the same inventory from your own screens.

The partner API covers the things you would expect: looking up products and availability, producing quotations, creating a booking and confirming it, cancelling one, and pulling statements. Each key carries its own scopes, an IP allowlist and rate limits. That means you can give a developer a key that can read availability but cannot book, or give your booking engine a key that can do everything but only from your server's address.

There is also a certification endpoint, which exists so you can test an integration before it goes live. Use it. The most expensive bug in any booking integration is the one that is discovered by a real customer, and a test endpoint exists precisely so that you find it first.

A few lessons from watching integrations go live.

Start with read-only keys. Build the search and availability screens first, check them against what the portal shows, and only then ask for booking scopes.

Log your own requests and responses, but be careful about what you log. Passport numbers and personal details should not end up in a general-purpose log file that half your engineering team can open.

Handle failure as a first-class case. A supplier may be slow, a date may be sold out or a request may time out. Your system should know what to show in each case and should never tell a customer a booking is confirmed until it has been.

Respect the rate limits. If you hit a limit regularly, the answer is to cache the things that do not change often, not to ask for a bigger limit.

Visas and flights: the two questions every client asks next

Anyone who sells Singapore sells an itinerary, and within a day of the first quotation the client asks two things: do I need a visa, and what do I show at the border for my flights?

For the first, the public site has a visa requirements section at /visa-requirements where you can look up requirements by destination. I use it as a quick reference before I quote anything for a client whose passport I do not know well. It is built from official sources, and entries are re-checked on a regular schedule, but visa rules change and the embassy or immigration authority is always the last word. Tell your client that. If your client prefers help with the application itself, visa assistance is one of the services the programme includes, and your own team can pass the case across rather than guess.

For the second, many embassies and visa centres ask for proof of onward travel or a flight itinerary when you apply. HolidaySG offers a manual flight reservation service at /flight-reservation for exactly that. I want to be careful with the wording here, because it is easy to oversell. A flight reservation is a reservation made to support a visa application. It is not an issued ticket, it is not a guarantee that a flight will operate on that day, and it is not a promise that a visa will be approved. Explain this to your client in those words. Clients who understand what they are buying are the clients who do not call you angry in three weeks.

Send both links to your client in the quotation email. It saves a round of messages and it shows that your agency has thought about the whole journey, not only the tickets.

How rates, margin and terms actually work

I promised to return to this. It is the section many agents skip and then regret skipping.

Your rates inside the portal are your own. Your margin, your payment terms and your commission group are set on your partner record by HolidaySG after your application has been reviewed. You do not pick them on the application form, and they depend on the market you sell in and the volume you do. Two agencies can look at the same product on the same afternoon and see different prices, and that is by design.

What does this mean for you in practice?

It means you should not build your business plan on a figure you read on a web page. Not on this one, and not on anyone else's. The only number that counts is the one you see when you are signed in, and the only terms that count are the ones agreed with the partnerships team. Ask for them in writing and keep them.

It means you should plan your own margin on top of the partner rate, with room for payment costs, support time and the occasional goodwill gesture. Agents who sell at the thinnest possible markup tend to find that one problem booking wipes out the profit of ten good ones.

It means you should review your terms as your volume changes. A partner who starts small and grows may reasonably ask for a conversation about their arrangements. Come with your numbers.

Finally, it means you should keep your public prices honest. Do not promise your customers things the programme does not promise you. In particular, avoid advertising any booking as certain before it has been confirmed, and avoid promising refunds or cancellation terms that you have not checked for the specific product. Terms differ by product and by supplier, so read each one.

Applying, step by step

The application is deliberately short, but it is read by a person, so treat it like a job application.

Go to /apply/b2b. Fill in your company details accurately: the registered name, the address, the contact person and the website if you have one. Then upload one to three business documents. A business registration certificate is the obvious choice, and a licence if you hold one is helpful. Use clear scans and not photographs taken at an angle in a poor light.

A person reviews every application. There is no automatic approval, which is a feature and not an obstacle: it keeps the partner base real. The review checks things like whether your company details are consistent and whether you already have an account with the same email domain. If you are a second applicant from a company that already has an account, the answer is to ask your colleague to add you as staff.

When the account is live you will receive an email, and from then on you can sign in at /b2b/login. The first time you sign in from a new device you will be asked for an email code, and that is normal.

Some tips that make approval smoother.

Use a business email address on your own domain, not a free mailbox, where you can. It helps the reviewer to match your email to your website.

Make sure your documents show the same company name you typed on the form. Mismatches are the most common reason for follow-up questions.

Answer follow-up emails quickly. A slow reply is the most common reason a two-day review becomes a two-week one.

Your first week: a practical plan

Approval arrives, you sign in, and then what? Here is the sequence I recommend.

On day one, add your staff and set their permissions. Do this before anyone starts booking, so that the first records on your account are made by the right logins.

Also on day one, look around. Open a handful of products you already sell and compare their partner rates with what you charge. This is the moment to notice any product where your existing price is now too low or too high.

On day two, fund your wallet with a modest float and make one small test booking for something simple. Follow it all the way through to the bookings list and the statement. You are testing the system and your own process at once.

On day three, build one quotation in the Tour Package Builder for a real or imagined client, and download both the client version and the internal costing. Check that the client version shows no net prices.

On day four, set up your packages and decide which products you distribute to which channel.

On day five, if you have a developer, ask them to generate a read-only API key and run the certification endpoint. If you have no developer, skip this step with a clear conscience. Plenty of successful partners never touch the API.

By the end of the week you should know whether the programme fits the way your business works. If it does, scale up. If something is awkward, tell the partnerships team while it is still a small thing.

Mistakes I see agents make

I have watched enough agencies join programmes like this to recognise the patterns. Here are the ones I would warn you about.

Quoting before checking dates. Many Singapore attractions use dated tickets, and a ticket for the wrong day is simply the wrong ticket. Confirm the travel date with the client and again before you pay.

Forgetting lead times. Some sessions and activities need to be booked a day or more ahead. If your client lands tomorrow and wants a timed session tonight, the answer may be no. Say so early, and offer something else.

Ignoring passenger data quality. Ferry and visa work run on exact names and numbers. A single transposed digit can derail a trip.

Over-promising on confirmation. Never tell a client a booking is confirmed until the portal shows that it is. If you are waiting, say you are waiting.

Skipping the weekly reconciliation. Small discrepancies are easy to fix this week and painful to fix next quarter.

Letting accounts be shared. A shared login means nobody is accountable. Give everyone their own.

Treating the quotation as a contract. A quotation is a proposal. Make it clear to your client what is included, what is excluded and what happens if prices change before they confirm.

Frequently asked questions

Who can join the HolidaySG partner programme?

Travel agencies, tour operators, freelance travel consultants, corporate travel companies, online travel businesses, destination management companies and visa consultants are the groups the programme is designed for. Every application is reviewed by a person.

Does it cost anything to apply?

The application itself is a form and a set of business documents. For anything to do with fees, minimum balances or terms, ask the partnerships team and get the answer in writing, because those are agreed on your partner record and not published on a web page.

Can I choose my own margin or commission?

No. Your margin, payment terms and commission group are set by HolidaySG after your application is reviewed. They depend on the market you sell in and the volume you do. You then add your own markup when you sell to your customers.

How do I pay for bookings?

From your wallet balance, which you top up in advance, or by card at checkout. Every movement appears on your statement.

Can my colleagues have their own logins?

Yes. Add them under Staff. Do not apply for a separate account for each person, because the programme allows one account per company.

What does the Tour Package Builder do?

It lets you build a multi-day client quotation with tickets at your partner rate and share it as a link or PDF. It produces quotations only. It never charges a card or makes a booking.

Is there an API?

Yes. You can generate API keys in the portal. Each key has its own scopes, an IP allowlist and rate limits, and there is a certification endpoint for testing before you go live.

Does the programme help with visas?

Visa assistance is one of the services included. For quick reference on requirements by destination, the public /visa-requirements section is a useful starting point, but the embassy or immigration authority always has the final word.

Can you provide a flight reservation for a visa application?

A manual flight reservation service is available at /flight-reservation. It is a reservation to support a visa application, not an issued ticket, and it does not guarantee that a visa will be approved.

How long does approval take?

A person reviews each application, so it depends on how complete your documents are and how quickly you answer any follow-up questions. You will get an email when the account is live.

Are my documents safe?

Business documents are stored privately and are visible only to HolidaySG admin staff. New devices are verified with an email code, and you are alerted when one signs in.