Prerequisite: Availability and Rates API
Intro to reservation management
The reservation management capability of the Lodging Supply GraphQL API enables a partner to
- Receive notifications for reservation events in real-time and confirm receipt of the events
- Retrieve reservations and all reservation details, such as check-in and checkout dates, guest information, payment information, and cancellation policy
- Update reservations (reconcile, cancel, and refund) in partner systems based on changes in our system
Reservation delivery
This feature of the reservation management capability enables partners to
- Receive automatic notification of new, modified, and cancelled reservations
- Update confirmation codes in reservations
- Confirm that reservation events have been received
Reservation delivery ensures that you are notified of reservation events in real time, and it facilitates reservation management over time to continually address partners’ and travelers’ evolving needs. Refer to Reservation delivery for full details.
Reservation retrieval
The reservations query is provided to enable a partner to retrieve reservations made on Expedia Group points-of-sale. Once the query is implemented, lodging partners can use this capability to retrieve all reservation details including amounts, reconciliation eligibility, payment tokens, status, and other important reservation information. Reservations can be queried 465 days in the past and up to 500 days in the future. Once retrieved, reservations can be filtered by check-in date, checkout date, last updated date, reservation IDs, or reservation status.
Refer to Reservation retrieval for full details.
Note: This capability retrieves reservations for properties that were onboarded to Expedia sites only. Retrieving reservations for Vrbo properties is not supported at this time.
Reservation update
This feature enables lodging partners to
Cancel reservations before or after arrival without penalty.
Before arrival (defined as before 23:59 on the check-in date, local property time), reservations can be cancelled without penalty only. After arrival, reservations can be cancelled with or without penalty.
Before guest arrival:
After guest arrival:
Update reservations.
For Expedia Collect reservations, you can only remove nights. For Hotel Collect reservations, you can add and remove nights to the beginning or end of the reservation's original dates.
After guest arrival:
Refund reservation amounts if issues arose during the guest's stay (Expedia Collect reservations only).
After guest arrival:
If you intend to implement the reservation update feature, you must implement the reservations query, which enables lodging partners to determine whether reservations are eligible for reconciliation. Partners will not need to rely on error messaging or hard-coded reconciliation criteria in their systems. Instead, they can proactively query for eligibility criteria so that they know exactly which reconciliation actions can be taken.
Refer to Reservation update for full details.
Comparison to booking APIs
The following operations are possible with reservation management but not possible with Booking Notification API:
- Retrieve reservation up to 465 days in the past and up to 500 days into the future
- Check the reconciliation status of a reservation
- Modify and cancel reservations
And these operations are possible with reservation management but not with the Booking Retrieval and Booking Confirmation APIs:
- Push new, modified, or cancelled reservations
- Retrieve reservations up to 465 days in the past and up to 500 days into the future
- Check the reconciliation status of a reservation
- Modify and cancel reservations
In addition, be aware of these differences in the response attributes of this API:
| Booking APIs | Reservation management capability |
|---|---|
Prefix the value of the rate ID in the source field with an "A-" to indicate that a reservation is Hotel Collect, such as A-Expedia or A-Hotels.com | Removes the prefix from the rate ID and provides the businessModel field so that partners can identify the collection model |
| Offer three types of transactions: original reservation, modified reservation, and cancelled reservation | Provides the status field, which supports the BOOKED, MODIFIED, and CANCELLED values |
Bed types, smoking preference, multi-room reservation messages, and payment instructions are represented within SpecialRequests with unique request codes | Provides the bedTypes, smokingType, and multiRoomText fields, and the specialRequest field returns the traveler-specific requests for reservations |
| Return the total amounts after tax along with the tax amount | Return the total amounts after tax along with the tax amount |
Finally, the Lodging Supply GraphL API returns Unicode characters if the guest provided these in the reservation. This includes non-ASCII characters and non-English characters such as Chinese and Japanese, which could be included in guest names and special requests. Therefore, you must support all UTF-8 and Unicode characters.