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Overview

The Hotel Availability Check (HAC) API allows partners that offer online hotel booking to show their availability and prices on Tripadvisor. Three distinct types of requests are sent by Tripadvisor, each of which requires a different response.

  1. The Configuration request is sent by us at least once a day. The response contains some contact information and the rate at which you would like to receive requests.
  2. The Hotel Inventory request is sent by us at least once a day so we can match your hotels against ours. The response contains detailed information about each hotel in your inventory.
  3. The Availability request is made to get price and availability and is made whenever a user views a page that shows availability for a hotel connected through your system. The request can include one to many hotels. The response contains price and availability of the hotel(s) included in the request. As of API v8 Checking availability could include Hotel Availability and Expanded Availability.

The HTTP or HTTPS URL to a Hotel Availability Check (HAC) API implementation is called a 'partner endpoint' or just 'endpoint'. In this documentation, the url:

http://www.partner-site.com/api_implementation

will be used as the example endpoint to a fictitious HAC API implementation.

If you wish to become an integrated partner with Tripadvisor, please see https://www.tripadvisor.com/business/about-our-partners. 

Certification Process

Hotel Availability Check Implementation

  1. Implement the HAC API : Use the documentation of the HAC API below to complete a HAC API implementation for your site. This includes all three responses: Configuration, Inventory, and Availability. Tripadvisor offers a test site you can use while developing. This site will make different HAC API calls and allow you to verify the results. It will also provide helpful feedback if it encounters problems with your implementation.

Certification

  1. API Endpoint Submission: Once you have finished building your API, visit API Submission site to complete our integration testing process. You must use this link to submit your production endpoint for approval. If you fail any of the tests, you will need to fix the issues before you can proceed to the next test. Important: You must provide your full inventory and remove all test properties for us to consider your implementation complete. Tripadvisor expects you to continue to provide your entire inventory. If the entire inventory is not provided your connection maybe paused which will pause all traffic for all hotels connected through your system.
  2. Quality Assurance: Once you have completed the above steps, your endpoint will be submitted to our quality assurance team. They will conduct further testing before your endpoint can be approved. Once the quality assurance team has approved your API implementation, you will receive an email confirming that you have completed this step.
  3. Inventory Matching: Once approved, an automated process at Tripadvisor will download your hotel inventory from your endpoint. This process will attempt to match your hotels to Tripadvisor hotels. All unmatched hotels will go into a separate queue to be reviewed manually, which may prevent your hotels from being able to use TripConnect. You can help the matching process by ensuring that both the hotel name and address are accurate.
  4. Certification Confirmation : Once you have completed the steps listed above, you will receive confirmation of your certification level. You will also receive instructions on how to download localized marketing materials and PR templates to promote your certification status to hotel partners.

General Requirements

Technical Requirements

All HAC API requests from Tripadvisor are sent as a HTTP GET (configuration and inventory) or HTTP POST (availability) request. All parameters will be application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

All responses must conform to the JSON specification and be sent with the HTTP Content-Type header set to application/json.

All responses must use UTF-8 encoding.

All responses must return status code 200 (success). Any other status code is not acceptable. This includes status in the 300s (which indicates redirection), 400s (which indicates client error), and 500s (which indicates server error).

Redirects

Responses must not redirect to another URL. All the URLs in the API below do not use a trailing slash and you cannot redirect to a URL that contains one.

Optional Fields

Fields that are marked as '[Optional]' do not need to be included in your responses. When you do not have a value for an optional field, it should be omitted entirely. Do not include the field with an empty string.

JSON Data Types

There are a few datatypes used throughout this API.

String - Most values are strings. Strings must have quote marks around them. As stated above, empty strings are unacceptable for optional fields. Do not use control characters like \r, \n, or \t in Strings.
Number - A number can be used to represent anything from a Tripadvisor ID to a price. Numbers should not have quotes around them. Numbers can also have decimal points if needed
Boolean - Can only be the word true or false. Booleans are not written in quotes. 

Performance

Your API needs to perform at a certain speed in order to handle Tripadvisor traffic. Responses to HAC API requests can take no longer than 10 seconds on average. The Hotel Inventory Response should take no more than 10 minutes to respond.

Additional Parameters in Tripadvisor Requests

Tripadvisor may add new parameters to its API requests at future dates. Those may not be documented at the time of your implementation so you should not validate against new parameters. These newly released parameters should not cause your API to return errors.