Home → Arctic Reservations → Booking Agents → Using Referral Links
28.8. Using Referral Links
Referral links are a great way to allow your agents to drive guests to your website to book online while ensuring that the agent still receives credit for the booking. They simplify the booking process for those agents who have the customer pay you directly and who, beyond referring guests to you, do not handle any other details for their guests.
The referral links can be put directly on an agent's website or they can be emailed to their contacts. When an agent uses a referral link to direct their guest to your website to create a booking, anything the guest books within 48 hours of clicking the link will be tied to that booking agent and they will be properly credited for the booking. However, if the guest returns to make future bookings by accessing your site directly after the 48 hour initial window, their future bookings will not be credited to the agent who originally referred them. Referral links are only available for agents for whom the "Who Pays" is set to customer.
If you have enabled the referral link for a booking agent for whom the "Who Pays" is set to customer, once you click "Submit" to finish the agent creation/update process, Arctic will generate their referral code. This code will then be displayed on the agent's "View Person" page as shown here:
The code shown in the "Referral Link" section can be copied and appended to any guest facing site url to create a full referral link a guest can use to access the system and give credit to the referring agent.
For instance, this is the url for our general booking page:
https://reservations.myraftingcompany.com/reserve
To make this a referral link associated with Snow White, all that needs to happen is that we append her code, ?ref=hVWk2, shown in the image above, to the end of the link.
The complete referral link looks like this:
https://reservations.myraftingcompany.com/reserve?ref=hVWk2
Notice that there are no additional spaces or backslashes added to the original url. The code is appended right to the end.
You or your agents that have referral links enabled can use this method to create a referral link from any page on your guest-facing site. If the agent is going to email a guest a link for a specific trip type or trip date, they should navigate to the relevant page on your guest-facing site, copy the URL shown in the address bar of their browser, and then append their referral code to the link. A referral link, like this, would take their guest directly to the booking page they are interested in without the guest having to navigate the broader booking pages of your guest-facing site to find exactly what they are interested in. The same approach can be used by agents to post links from their website to your booking site. This will allow the agent to only link to the booking pages for the specific activities you offer that they wants to promote rather than linking to your general booking page.