Multilingual Airport Transfer Booking Software: What to Translate and Test

What has to be translated (and what usually gets missed)

Menus and buttons are the easy part and the least important. Passengers rarely complain that a label is in English; they miss pickups because the meeting-point instructions were. Prioritise the text that changes what a passenger does:

• Pickup and meeting-point instructions for every stop and terminal
• Fare conditions, luggage rules, child-seat and cancellation terms
• Payment errors and card-authentication prompts
• Booking confirmations, reminders and flight-delay or re-timing messages
• Driver-arrival messages and what to do if the passenger cannot find the vehicle

Localise more than the words

A Spanish or Portuguese passenger reads 03/04 as 3 April, an American as 4 March. Show dates with the month written out or in the passenger's own format, show prices in the currency they pay in with the right decimal separator, and store phone numbers in international format so messages reach foreign mobiles.

Payments matter as much as language. Cards work almost everywhere, but local methods often decide whether a booking completes: MB WAY and Multibanco in Portugal, Bizum in Spain and CMI cards in Morocco are common examples.

Keep one booking, whatever the language

Every language version must sell from the same live seat inventory and write to the same booking record. If each language site has its own inventory, the same seat can be sold twice; if each has its own records, staff cannot find a booking when the passenger calls.

Make staff search accent-insensitive, so a search for "Goncalves" finds "Gonçalves" and "Munoz" finds "Muñoz", and make sure booking references and flight numbers are language-neutral.

SMS, WhatsApp and right-to-left scripts

Message length depends on the alphabet. A standard SMS holds 160 characters in the basic GSM alphabet, but only 70 once it contains characters outside it — Portuguese letters such as ã and õ, and all Arabic text. A confirmation that fits one message in English can split into three in Portuguese or Arabic, raising cost and arriving out of order. Keep critical messages short, put the pickup time and place first, and consider WhatsApp where passengers expect it.

Arabic and Hebrew read right to left. Check that the booking page, confirmation e-mails and messages mirror correctly, that numbers and flight codes still read in the right order, and that mixed English and Arabic lines do not scramble.

Machine translation or human review?

Machine translation is fine for broad discovery content but risky for anything contractual or safety-related. A sensible split is human-reviewed text for pickup instructions, fare and cancellation terms and payment messages, and machine translation for everything else, reviewed when complaints show a problem.

A test plan before you launch a language

Before selling in a new language, have a native speaker run the complete journey on a phone, not a desktop:

• Book, pay with a local method, and receive the confirmation
• Trigger a payment failure and read the error
• Change the flight and check the re-timing message
• Cancel and confirm the refund wording matches your terms
• Find the booking as staff using the passenger's name with and without accents

Frequently asked questions

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