Travel Tech Solutions: Access Optimised Booking Proccesses with Hotelbeds’ Booking APIs

Why are Booking APIs Essential?

Booking API’s, in today’s industry, are an almost integral solution for travel distributors offering valuable travel products to today’s traveller, as they enable more automated processes, expanded reach, and more efficient, customised booking and customer experiences.

This is achieved through:

• Real-time access to inventory.
• Integration with various suppliers.
• Automated tasks such as payment processing and ticketing.
• Streamlined booking processes.

If you haven't yet discovered the full suite of API solutions offered by Hotelbeds, read more about our comprehensive travel API solutions here, and the value they offer for travel professionals looking to increase their efficiency, scalability and profitability in this competitive industry.

A good booking API allows end-to-end management for all bookings, making the online booking experience seamless for both travel distributors, aggregators, and end customers.

But, how does this benefit you in the real-world? Here are a few key ways that a booking API enables you to optimise your success.

Real-time Data and Inventory Access

Equals improved reach and live pricing.

Live pricing and availability: Booking APIs provide access to up-to-date information, including real-time pricing, availability, and special offers from suppliers.

Global reach: Distributors can access, and therefore sell, a wider range of inventory from various suppliers, both domestically and internationally, without needing to manage multiple systems manually. This streamlines the ability to offer more products to in-market customers without creating additional operational processes.

Streamlined Booking Processes

Most APIs automate various steps in the booking process, and this can range from search and selection to confirmation and ticketing, which helps to reduce manual effort for distributors, and potential human errors, and improves customer experience!

As part of these automated processes, customers have a more intuitive and convenient booking journey, which encourages more positive experiences and increases the likelihood of returning customers.

This is where the key features of Hotelbeds’ booking API come into their own, offering a seamless booking experience for customers thanks to its fast and easy integration:

• Instant booking confirmation.
• Flexible check-in dates.
• Find products by geolocation and keywords.
• Push notifications.
• Advanced filtering options.

Supplier Integration and Automation

APIs help to facilitate a more seamless connection between distributors and various travel product suppliers through integration and automation; this can include hotels, rental car companies, local and global experience providers, and airlines.

This integration and communication between systems allows for increased automation, such as the aforementioned points on automated payment processing and ticketing. But APIs can streamline numerous manual processes including invoicing, refund procedures, generating and delivering tickets and vouchers to customers.

This reduces the operational demand required for these processes and allows a more efficient way of working. Not to mention that this also improves customer experience due to the effective completion of these crucial booking journey aspects, all of which impact whether or not a customer will return to you as a travel distributor.

Increased Efficiency and Scalability

Feeding into this idea of reduced operational demand, is the consequent efficiency and scalability that comes with the use of a reliable booking API when it comes to:

• Cost and time savings: through the reduction of manual work, automation allows for faster, more efficient operations.
• Scalability: through increased automation and the level of integration available with a booking API, distributors can more easily scale their operations to meet and capture more demand, without significant changes or strain on their infrastructure.
• Reduced development costs: using a pre-built API allows distributors to avoid the costs and complexities of building their own booking system from scratch.
• Improved core responsibilities: through automating operational tasks and providing a more streamlined booking process, distributors can better focus on areas they can provide increased value to customers, such as marketing and customer service.

Hotelbeds’ Booking APIs – Hotels and Activities

Now that we understand a few of the key benefits of booking APIs, where does Hotelbeds come in? And what APIs do we offer to enable a more optimised, efficient and ultimately successful business for you?

Let us introduce our Hotel and Activities Booking APIs:

The Hotel Booking API from Hotelbeds

When it comes to hotel reservations in particular, there are a few ways to gain access to hotel data and booking capabilities:

• Connecting via travel ecosystem players, like Hotelbeds.
• Direct connection via property management (PMS) and central reservation systems (CRS).
• Connection via channel managers.
• Connection via aggregators, such as GDSs.
• Partnering with big OTAs.

The Hotelbeds Hotel Booking API is designed to streamline the integration of hotel reservations into websites and apps. Partners gain access to Hotelbeds’ extensive global accommodation inventory in real-time, simplifying tasks like searching for options, confirming bookings, managing reservations, and more.

Our Hotel Booking API is the main hotel API in our API ecosystem, covering the complete booking process. Designed to book hotels in real-time, in just a few steps, this API generates full lists of hotels, confirms bookings, and enables seamless booking management and modification.

Our Hotel Booking API works in conjunction with our Content API to obtain important content information from the hotels, such as pictures, descriptions, facilities, and services.

Key Features of Hotelbeds’ Booking API

Streamline your booking funnel with our API Suite’s powerful Hotel Booking API to deliver a fast, intuitive booking experience with the following features:

• Fast and easy integration with various global suppliers.
• Quick access to a global inventory of accommodations.
• Streamlined integration of hotel reservations into websites and apps.
• Simple search functionalities for accommodation options.
• Advanced filtering options, including the ability to find products by geolocation and keywords.
• Quick and direct confirmation of bookings.
• Real-time access to updated information on pricing and availability.

How does our Hotel Booking API work?

Our Hotel Booking API uses three different methods to manage booking functions: Hotels, CheckRates, and Bookings.

Hotels: this method (/hotels) is used to request room availability, where filters and special features can be applied before sending an availability request; offer a flexible date search; generate a list of hotels with room, board and rate types for these hotels and restricted to the selected dates; and return cancellation fees within the availability response.

Check Rates: this method returns up-to-date availability and prices on hotels that require this information to be obtained prior to booking.

Bookings: this allows distributors to confirm a booking, obtain a list of bookings, modify or cancel any booking, or simulate a cancellation to see any cancellation conditions.

The Activities Booking API from Hotelbeds

Our API solutions also offer the ability to book activities and in-destination experiences, allowing you to provide even more travel products to customers and expand your value to them.

This Activities Booking API is designed to:

• Enable the construction or creation of a complete activities website or mobile application (app).
• Integrate activities and experiences into existing systems, both internal and external.
• Integrate content for these activities and experiences into a common CMS, applicable to all travel products being distributed.

How does the Activities API work?

Our Activities Booking API can be split into three main functions:

• Availability / Search: offers a real-time list of available activities and experiences depending on the filters and special features applied.
• Details / CheckRate: return real-time availability for specific activity codes and operational dates, along with essential details.
• Booking /Post-booking: confirm, manage and modify all bookings.

Discover more information about our comprehensive APIs here.

If you’re not yet one of our valuable partners, to access our API solutions and begin optimising your booking success with Hotelbeds, sign up today.

It’s our mission to empower choice for our partners and travellers worldwide:

• Presence in 170+ countries worldwide – with 250,000+ hotels and 23,000+ in-destination experiences, global transfer route coverage and car hire.
• Access to dedicated Account Managers, whose goal is your growth.
• 1000 sourcing and destination experts, negotiating vital rates and availabilities.
• Seamless API integrations tailored to your business needs.
• Intelligent campaigns – to assist in the capture of seasonal demand.

Become a Hotelbeds partner today