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The Booking Notification API is an interface that allows Expedia Group to deliver traveler bookings made on any Expedia Group point of sale directly to your central reservation system (CRS) or property management system (PMS) for the bookings to be confirmed.

• Receive new, modified, or cancelled bookings in close to real time
• Provide confirmation numbers for bookings

Booking Notification API is a notification-based API where Expedia Group initiates the notifications. It allows you to receive new, modified or cancelled reservations in near real time, as travelers make these bookings on Expedia Group points of sale.

Expedia Group allows customers to book against the most recent information received from you through Partner Central or Availability and Rates API and stored locally in Expedia Group’s systems. Reservations sent through Booking Notification API to you have already been confirmed with the traveler. If Expedia Group doesn’t receive a response from your system, notifications automatically fall back to email.

Also note that anyone already configured with Booking Retrieval and Booking Confirmation APIs who is interested in implementing Booking Notification API should contact us or your Expedia Group Technical Relationship Manager to discuss their options. You cannot be configured for both at the same time.

The following list is an overview of features supported in the Booking Notification API as well as some notable features that are not supported.

Included:

• Receive new, modified, or cancelled bookings in real time
• Membership or loyalty numbers
• Special request text- bookings can include free-text special requests from travelers
• Coded special requests for bed type, smoking preference, multi-room booking, payment instruction, value-add promotion, and customer-entered (free form text)
• Expedia Virtual Card used to send payment details to properties for Expedia Collect reservations
• Bookings with Unicode characters- travelers in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan can enter their name and special requests in their local language at the time of booking
• Point of sale where the booking originated (i.e. Hotels.com, Orbitz, Expedia, etc.)

Not included:

• Room type name is not passed back as part of the reservation, only room type IDs are returned
• Rate plan name is not passed back as part of the reservation, only rate plan IDs are returned
• Pricing Model used by the property is not passed back as part of the reservation
• Deposit or cancellation policies are not passed back as part of the reservation
• Translation of free form text- Other languages may be used in free form text fields, but no translation of these fields is provided

Expedia Group is responsible for the sequencing of messages and ensures that a reservation message has been processed by the property before sending a modification or cancellation for the booking.

When more than one notification is pending for the same booking, Expedia Group will always wait for a valid response for the previous notification before sending the next one. All information sent in the notification request must be passed down to the property’s property management system (PMS) or central reservation system (CRS).

If Expedia Group does not receive a success response from you, the booking notification message (new reservation, modification, or cancellation) will be assumed to have failed. The message will be retried several times, but if no success response is received, or if an OTA error is returned, the notification will be sent to the property by email.

Bookings that fall back to email will not have modifications or cancellations sent through the Booking Notification API. Any modifications or cancellations of reservations that have fallen back to email notification will be delivered by the same fallback method.

The reservations sent with the Booking Notification API are notifications, made after the booking has been confirmed to the guest. You cannot reject these reservation notifications. Inventory issues are not an acceptable reason to reject a booking since these are avoidable if you update your inventory regularly. See Book with locally stored inventory and rates for more information.