Guidelines and tips
Guidelines for using promotions
When creating promotions for display on our websites:
Ensure that promotions that provide discounts off your standard rates do not mislead travelers in any way and are not based on false information.
Ensure that all promotions are provided to guests who have made promotional bookings. For example, if you upload a discounted price, you must honor that price.
If you create a time-limited discount promotion (such as a 72-hour sale), the discounted price for that particular property must be available only for the duration of the promotion. After the duration, the price should return to your regular, non-discounted price for a reasonable period of time.
Remember that you are responsible for understanding the laws applicable to your promotions and ensuring that your promotions and other content comply with all applicable laws. These guidelines are not legal advice. Expedia Group reserves the right to remove any promotions that we believe are in violation of these guidelines or applicable law.
Best practices for creating promotions
Do not send reduced rates to Expedia in place of discounting rates through this API. For instance, if providing 10% off of a $100 stay, do not submit a $90 rate. This will double the promotional offer for the traveler.
Discounts can be 1-75% off.
Ensure you are not setting conflicting field values, such as minimum or maximum length of stay or advanced booking windows that contradict your rate plan restrictions.
Ensure you have access to the properties and credentials within Expedia in order to manage promotions using this API.
Use same-day and early-booking promotion types to leverage specialized on-site merchandising.
When specifying the name of a promotion (using the
codefield), up to 80 characters are supported by the Booking Retrieval API and up to 32 characters are supported by the Booking Notification API. If the limit is exceeded, the promotion's name is truncated.
Technical tips and tricks
If a request is issued using an expired token, an error is returned that states the token is “invalid”. Request a new token if this error arises.
If calling the API from multiple servers, you can request a unique access token from each server and save it in memory.
All time fields are provided in local property time.
Prior to updating information through a mutation, issue a query using the promotion ID to retrieve the latest data on the promotion. Promotions can be updated manually through other channels, so you want to ensure the latest information is retrieved.
Ensure that the specified rate plan ID belongs to the property. This API operates under the assumption that the rate plan IDs are available to the properties, and an error will arise if the rate plan is not applicable to the property.
Do not modify a basic promotion to change it to an early-booking or same-day promotion (or vice versa). To ensure proper merchandising on site, deactivate the promotion and then create a new promotion of a different type.
The promotions capability is not available for large hotel chains. If you serve chain hotels in addition to independent ones, we strongly recommend displaying a friendly error message in your user interface to remind properties that they can load individual promotions in Partner Central. Example: “This functionality is not available for chain properties. Instead, you can load promotions using Expedia’s Partner Central.”