Travelers now expect booking platforms and travel blogs to have advanced functionality, from bag tracking to flight status and legroom. Therefore, it is important for webmasters to share as much useful information as possible to entice the user to click and get the highest payout with travel affiliate programs. To do this, you can search for flight status, seats, etc. directly from the airline’s website. An API that provides the latest information about In this post, we reviewed the Expedia booking platform and API solution, as well as shared alternative APIs and integration tips.
About Expedia
Expedia Group is an American online travel booking company for leisure and business travel. It combines travel fare aggregators and metasearch engines such as Expedia.com, Vrbo, Hotels.com, Trivago, CarRentals.com, Orbitz, and Hotwire.com. With more than 20 years of experience at the forefront of the travel niche, Expedia may know everything when it comes to starting and growing a travel business.
Expedia Partner Solutions is a B2B partnership brand that aims to contribute to the growth of travel partners worldwide through Expedia Group’s advanced technology, travel supply and support. As an EPS partner, you’ll be able to take advantage of the company’s advanced technology and ever-expanding solutions, along with support from industry experts.
Advantages of partnering with Expedia
By partnering with Expedia, you can experience many benefits, from growing your brand to improving the customer experience and increasing sales. Some of those:
- Exceptionally wide range of travel services: more than 700,000 properties, 500 airlines, 200,000 events and 175 car rental companies.
- Competitive prices and availability for worldwide travel offers.
- A pool of high-quality content to help partners increase conversions.
- From customizable travel API to ready made hotel booking template etc. state-of-the-art software.
- Assistance from launch optimization to technical integration and digital marketing.
As an Expedia partner, you can take your project to the next level and build trust with your audience by automating user interaction on your website via an API. Below you will learn about the API solution that Expedia offers.
EPS Rapid — Hotel API from Expedia
With EPS Rapid, Expedia’s fast and lightweight API, you can create a customized hotel reservation experience from call to checkout and share accommodation options with your audience at the best prices worldwide. EPS Rapid aims to help create an intuitive booking path and provide you with all the data you and your target audience need to book a property. Depending on the experience they want to create, partners have access to accommodation, prices, maps, etc.
Here are some of the benefits for partners when using EPS Rapid:
- Access to over 700,000 accommodations in over 40 property categories, from apartments and houseboats to chain and boutique hotels, to help your audience book the best accommodation.
- Best deals with 10% off half of Expedia properties and highly profitable B2B deals from global hotels like Marriott International.
- More than 13 million high-quality property images and 7.5 million room photos with clear and optimized captions in 40 different languages.
- Keeping a rate up to 10 minutes when finalizing the reservation.
- Automatic access to the latest features of the API without the need for an upgrade. Learn more about the latest version – Rapid 3.
You can also find detailed instructions on how to create a reservation route with Expedia’s API on the website.
Flight search APIs
Expedia’s product has great functionality, but if you’re looking for more than just a hotel API, check out some alternative options below that provide flight search.
- First of all, check out this Expedia Mobile API console. It allows you to search for flights and get real-time pricing for one-way or round-trip scenarios. Product keys last about 20 minutes before they expire. The Mobile API console has a number of APIs: Hotels API, Flights API, Packages API, Trips API, User API, Cars API, and Lx API.
- With the Compare Flight Prices API you can compare live flight prices from Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, CheapOAir, Skyscanner and more. The IATA code for the cities of origin and destination includes fields such as departure and return dates, number of passengers, flight type and cabin. You can learn more in the ‘About’ section. Try up to 100 flight searches per month for free. Premium plans start at $19.99 per month.
- Expedia Scraper by Infatica is a proxy powered API for Expedia. It allows you to get reservation prices, flight data and more. Scraper has access to over 100 locations worldwide to submit your web scraping API requests and provides advanced features such as simultaneous API requests, CAPTCHA decoding, browser support, and JS rendering. Enjoy up to 100 free daily requests and unlock premium features starting at $25.00 per month.
- Flight API is a price comparison API that shares prices for flights, hotels, cars, and other travel services from over 50 vendors such as Priceline.com, Expedia, Cheaptickets.com, and more. For $49.00 per month, you get access to essential features like tracking any flight anywhere in the world anytime, and getting nearby airports results with auto-complete API for IATA codes.
Find more flight API solutions at this link.
How to Integrate the API: Best Practices
While APIs allow for automatic and near-instant data transfer without human intervention, setting up an API on your website takes some effort. Below, we’ve gathered some tips on how to improve your integration process.
- With so many APIs on the market, it’s important to understand where you start to find the right solution. Ask yourself these questions: What kind of website do I have? Can I activate the reservation or just share information about the flight? What are my budget or resource constraints? What information will my customers expect to find on my website to complete a reservation? Choose an API with the relevant scope.
- Understand the different types of API providers. It can be a global delivery system (GDS), technical service provider, over-the-air programming (OTA), metasearch engine. The API integration process will differ for each provider type. GDP APIs cover hundreds of airlines and also book and ticket, but can set surcharges and increase the price. Direct partnerships with airlines may require engineering effort, but they also require reservations, seats, luggage, etc. It provides great support and customization for A more balanced solution is to combine GDS and direct integrations.
- After choosing the platform from which to import the data, be sure to check the API documentation. Try the test version. Sometimes, core features are available for free. This allows you to see this API in practice and invest money in the tool that suits your business.
- Once you’ve decided on a particular API, get the API key for access and see if the provider can assist you with the integration or offer a pre-built API link. Otherwise, you may need a third-party integrator. Be sure to validate API responses at the end before posting. A great tool you can use for integration testing is Postman.
