Key Aspects to Know Before Including HotelBeds as a Supplier
Hotelbeds, since 2001, has been a leading accommodation wholesaler and the largest bed bank in the hospitality sector that provides a comprehensive listing of travel offerings worldwide. As a bed bank, it obtains rooms in bulk at discounted rates and then offers them to various businesses like OTAs, travel agents, and airlines.
Hotelbeds boasts a bedbank base of 300K hotels, 191 destination countries, 71K travel distributors, and 150 source markets, making it a preferred choice for many OTAs, hotel booking platforms, and other travel businesses.
If you’re looking to include Hotelbeds as a supplier to your inventory and offerings, go through the comprehensive details we mentioned here. You may need to understand the types of Hotelbeds APIs, steps, time, and cost to integrate it in-house vs via third-party vendors.
Let’s start with knowing Hotelbeds’ API suite – APItude (as they call it).
About APItude
Hotelbeds offers a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) named APItude, designed for integration by other hotel distribution providers or booking engine providers. This suite grants instant access to a network of approximately 300K hotels and encompasses a range of RESTful APIs meant to serve Hotelbeds Group clients, the APItude Hotel.
Hotelbeds also partners with other connectivity solution providers to maintain the currency and completeness of the data. Its other APIs cater to activities and transfers.
Functionalities and Attributes of APItude
APItude is Hotelbeds’ main API suite, offering vast functionalities created for hotel distribution and management requirements.
There are three primary APIs for hotels, activities, and transfers:
- Booking API: It manages reservation data and the hotel booking process for various activities and oversees data and operations regarding transfer reservations.
- Content API: It offers static and dynamic information about hotels’ activities and delivers data on available transfer options.
- Cache API: It presents pricing and availability snapshots for hotels, activities, and transfers, designed to optimize high-traffic platforms.
All these three types of APIs cater to three different areas – Hotels, Activities, and Transfers (Only Content API is not used for Transfers).
1. APItude for Hotels
Hotel Booking API – This is a central component within the Hotelbeds API framework. This API comprises the entire booking workflow, supplying real-time hotel reservations in a few steps. It helps generate hotel lists, confirm bookings, manage cancellations and changes, and retrieve complete booking information.
- /bookings: This multifaceted method caters to various booking-related needs. It can be used to confirm bookings, retrieve lists of all bookings, fetch specific booking details, make amendments to existing bookings, process booking cancellations, or simulate cancellations to understand the associated terms.
- /checkrates: Some hotels require a two-step booking process, necessitating a refresh for real-time availability and pricing. This method facilitates this process and displays upselling options, highlighting the differences between requested and upselling rates.
- /hotels: This method is primarily used to inquire about room availability. It provides advanced filters and flexible date search options, allowing users to explore a comprehensive list of hotels. This list includes room types, board variations, and rate details. All financial information is provided, including conclusive prices and transparent cancellation fees.
2. APItude for Activities
This API helps to check availability for tickets and excursions across various devices, including mobile, desktop, and tablets.
Activities Booking API – It looks over the real-time activities list and presents output based on user-defined filters. It also ensures accurate availability for specific activity codes based on their defined dates. This API becomes crucial after the booking stage as it steers several critical operations like handling booking confirmation, modification, and cancellations.
Activities Contents API – This API supplies auxiliary data on geographic aspects and presents extensive information when users ask about a specific activity. The Contents API ensures that every detail about the entertainment option is shown to the user, from enticing images to in-depth descriptions.
Activities Cache API – It details prices and brief snapshots of the selected landscape, modalities, and functional dates. This ensures that users always get real-time offerings.
3. APItude for Transfers
This suit comprises transfer-related functionalities and is available for users via websites and mobile devices. It also offers real-time availability (single or multiple) for transfer services to facilitate a complete integration across different platforms.
Transfers Booking API – This API is helpful to confirm bookings when choosing a transfer. The post-booking phase is equally streamlined, offering options for fetching booking details, complete lists, and cancellations.
It accepts multiple code types for different preferences, which include ATLAS for Hotelbeds’ custom hotel codes, IATA for standard airport codes, and GPS coordinates with necessary address descriptions. However, using GIATA is less reliable due to incomplete mapping.
Transfers Cache API – It allows the download of transfer-related portfolios and content and gives a full view of transfer operations, from routes to pick-up points. This API provides an exhaustive list of hotels, route portfolios, currency information, etc.
Now essential things about types of Hotelbeds API are covered, let’s move to their integration process.
Steps and Time Required to Include Hotelbeds as a Supplier
A complete preparatory assessment is mandatory before starting with the Hotelbeds API integration. Defining which services you want from Hotelbeds API and having a skilled team of developers is a must to start. The following things are required for the setup:
- Registration and API Key
- Configuration and Authentication
- Testing API Requests
Next comes the certification requirements. This integration will be evaluated on various functional, technical, and operational standards to create the best end-user experience. The focus is on five key areas – Workflow, Technical Aspects, Content, Availability with CheckRate and Confirmation, Voucher Issuance, and Testing in Live Environment. To confirm the integrity and robustness of your integration and enhance the user experience, following the compliance end-to-end is essential. For in-depth details, visit here.
Considering all the steps, this integration and certification may take from 2 to 3 months to be fully functional. The timeline includes API configuration, testing, and quality assurance tasks to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Commission Rates
The commission rates depend on the services chosen and the volume of bookings. While the exact commission rates vary, they typically range from 5% to 15% of the booking value.
Conclusion
If you want to integrate Hotelbeds API, you can either contact their manager and take all these decisions every step of the way while letting your developers figure it out without a complete guarantee of success or choose the easier option – contacting ZentrumHub, which already has a unified platform with APIs of 50+ global top-rated suppliers like Agoda, Expedia, TBO, etc.
With our solution, Zentrum Connect, you can go live on day 1 with Hotelbeds API. Our experienced team can own the process, ensuring hassle-free supplier integration. Write to integrations@zentrumhub.com to learn more.
