One hotel API or many supplier integrations: what to weigh

Connecting directly to several hotel suppliers gives you control over each relationship. Connecting to one hotel API gives you less to build and maintain. Neither is always right, so this guide gives you six questions to ask of any hotel API, and shows how the Idea Holiday hotel API, which gives access to 10M+ hotels, answers them.

How do you find a city and its hotels?

Look a city up by the first letters of its name, with an optional country filter. A country name such as oman or uae returns that country's cities, main ones first, and a mistyped name falls back to its first letters. To list the hotels of a city before any dates are chosen, a static list reads our stored hotels with no prices, pages by hotel ID, and does not count as a search.

Which price counts?

Search prices are indicative. At prebook, the supplier confirms the live price and the room is held for you until a stated time. The prebook answer shows the total payable and the Idea Holiday API fee, so you know the cost before you book.

What are the cancellation terms?

Each rate carries the date free cancellation ends, whether the room can be held unpaid, the tax inside the price when the supplier sends it, and any promotion. Hotel details and prebook add the cancellation policy and the rate conditions.

What does the traveller have to give?

Prebook tells you whether a PAN or a passport is required, so you can ask for it before you take payment.

What happens when something goes wrong?

• A booking request carries a unique Idempotency-Key, so a retry never books twice.
• If the hotel refuses the booking, the hotel price is refunded to your wallet.
• A booking that is still pending or unknown is settled later, and you hear about it by webhook.

What will you maintain?

With one API you keep one integration: one authentication method, one response format and one set of error codes. With several you keep each supplier's own, in exchange for deciding yourself which suppliers to connect. If you need only a few suppliers and have the engineering team to run them, direct integrations can make sense. If you want hotels working quickly alongside flights and fixed fares, one API is less to carry.

Common questions

Can I show a city's hotels before the traveller picks dates?

Yes. The static hotel list for a city has names, star ratings, addresses, map positions and a photo link when one is stored, with no prices or availability.

Do search results include map positions?

Yes. Search rows and hotel details carry latitude and longitude, and they are empty when the supplier sent none.

How many rooms can one search cover?

Up to 6 rooms, each with 1 to 8 adults and up to 4 children, for stays of 1 to 30 nights.