Can new travel agents sign themselves up on my portal, and can I check them before I let them start booking?
Yes. A B2B portal can carry its own agent registration form, so an agency that hears about you fills in their company details, uploads whatever you ask for, and lands in your system as a pending account rather than a working one. They cannot search, price or confirm anything until somebody on your side approves them, so a stranger finding your sign up page is not the same as a stranger selling your rates.
What you collect is up to you. Most portals let you choose which fields a new agent must complete, such as company name, trading address, a registration or licence number and a named contact, and let you ask for a document upload where your market expects proof that they really trade. You also decide what happens the moment you approve them, which markup group they fall into, and whether they begin on a prepaid balance or on credit.
It is worth being clear about what the system does not do. It can check the form is complete, but it cannot tell you the business is genuine. Whether that licence number is real, whether the company still trades, whether you want to carry their credit, all of that stays a human judgement or a check against an outside register, and whether you can connect to such a register depends on your country and on your plan. Some suppliers also set their own rules about who may resell their content, so your approval is not always the final word.
Before you open registration to the public, write down what you would want to see from an agency you have never met, then check that your sign up form asks for exactly that and that a pending agent genuinely cannot reach live inventory until you say yes.
