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What is Travel API? & 5 Steps for Integration in your Portal
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Travel API is basically set of web services to access the travel deals from different travel consolidators. GDS, third party flight APIs, hotel APIs — all are used by travel agencies to access the travel deals online.
Inventory is the heart and soul of any travel agency. Agree?
Without the right inventory/content at competitive rates for your market, people are not likely to buy from you, regardless of how much you spend on sales and marketing. Modern travelers, with a single search, they can view thousands of flights, hotels, activities, transfers and car rentals from across the world with real time rates and availability and instantly make reservations right on their mobile phones.
Over the last few years, with the growth of search engines and OTAs, people expect information at their fingertips whenever they want, wherever they want. Don’t they?
If you don’t have the information people are looking for, they will instantly switch to your competitor who does. The Travel market has become increasingly competitive and it’s the survival of the fittest.
Why Third-party Content?
The range of that content is not all that important if you are a startup or a very small agency handling a handful of customers or if you operate within a very small region.
In that case your direct contracts with a few local suppliers are sufficient. But if you’re looking to scale your business, having a large pool of inventory becomes essential to achieve that growth, as beyond a point it becomes incredibly difficult and costly to physically go and sign direct contracts with thousands of suppliers based in different regions.
What are Travel APIs?
In layman terms, an API allows you to integrate third-party GDS/Wholesaler inventory/feeds into the booking engine on your site. So when a customer makes a search to book a flight or a hotel on your site, they won’t be redirected to another site and the payment will be collected by you.
Just like suppliers provide APIs to give you access to their feeds, banks and other payment processors also provide APIs to use their services. By integrating the API of a payment gateway, the travelers would be able to make secure payments online using their credit card or debit card. There are multiple payment gateways available and your travel technology partner might help in choosing the right one.
Benefits of Travel APIs
· You can add markups for your agents/end-customers
· It is you who will receive the payment directly from customers
· Provide highly dynamic information returned from the XML pages
· Less maintenance of content that will allow you to focus on your core tasks like marketing and creating packages
· Reduce Travel agencies over head cost on a longer term
Below are the steps involved in API Integration
1) Supplier Selection
When choosing a supplier, do thorough research to make sure you choose a supplier that’s best for your Travel agency, based on your region, their rates, availability, requirements etc.
One Supplier might may have better rates and a wide range of hotels in your region than another supplier, so check their rates and availability beforehand. Also, not every supplier provides multiple modules (eg air, hotels, activities etc) in their API.
So the choice of the supplier also depends on what segments they provide in their APIs. So if you want to sell flights, hotels and cars, you need to either select a supplier that provides all three or integrate multiple suppliers. Remember, when going online, begin with the Supplier whom you are booking the most.
2) Signing the Contract & API Documentation
Once you have selected the supplier(s) you want to contract with, you need to sign an API contract with them. As mentioned in the previous point, a supplier may provide multiple APIs for different modules. A single contract covers all modules you choose, but the APIs will be separate. You will be required to provide details about your business — such as the types of products you sell, your annual bookings, website traffic etc. As mentioned earlier, you might also need to pay a deposit. However if you have a good relationship & you have given good volumes, the API charge with the supplier can be bargained or even be got FREE of charge. It depends on a case to case basis.
Once the contract has been signed and the payment has been made, the supplier will send you and your technology provider an API document along with a Test Access. This will provide access to test feeds but the rates will differ significantly from the supplier’s live rates, so don’t be alarmed. The API document contains all technical details about the API and what is included in it, such as the different rules, parameters and services. Here is where a trusted & reliable technology partner comes into the picture.
3) Assessment of the API document and Development
Upon the receipt of the API documentation, your technology partner will study the API and its technical feasibility with regards to their booking engine. This helps them decide if the API is ready-to-deploy or if they will have to make changes to their XML connector or even build a completely new connector for it.
Each API requires a separate connector and mapping with the booking engine, so if you have multiple APIs, your technology partner will have to build multiple connectors, which naturally will take longer than building a single connector.
4) Certification and Integration
Once the connector is ready, it will need to be certified by the supplier, to ensure it complies with the supplier’s standards. For existing connections, Hotel suppliers usually take around a couple of week’s time to complete the certification, while for newly developed connectors it can take around a month. GDS’s usually have long certification queues and may take a few weeks, so you need to be patient.
Once the certification is complete, the supplier will provide you credentials to access their live feeds which can used to make bookings. Your technology partner will replace the test feeds with the live ones and integrate them into the booking engine.
Expertise in aggregating feeds from multiple suppliers into a single booking engine provides travel agencies a single interface to access all third-party inventories, rather than shuffling through multiple screens / multiple logins.
By having an exclusive platform, you will be having the control over your Travel Company and not necessarily depend on the GDS or the supplier to control your travel companies.
5) Post Integration
Once the integration is complete and assuming your site is live, your clients will start seeing real-time rates and availability for the modules you have integrated when they make a search. One of the concerns a lot of travel agents have is the search response speed.
The search response speed depends on a number of factors, including server location, the architecture of the booking engine, the destination for which the search is made(cities with a large number of hotels will take longer to show up), no of APIs integrated(as the booking engine would call each API when aggregating results) etc. But the most important factor is the supplier response time. Some suppliers take longer to respond than other.
The average response time from the supplier side is roughly 10–12 seconds. When choosing a supplier, you may have to make a choice between speed and rates, as many suppliers who have great rates have a relatively slow response time and vice versa. So it’s important to factor in this point before discussing any speed issues you wish to raise with your technology partner. Hence the Travel technology company need to update at regular intervals so ensure your inventory is up-to-date.
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