Skip to main content

Booking Flow Overview

This article explains the Bundleport hotel booking experience from a product perspective. For endpoint-level details, see the REST API reference.

Overview​

Bundleport presents a single shopping and booking journey across multiple hotel suppliers. Travellers (or agency agents) start by exploring availability, refine options, lock prices, and finally confirm reservations. Throughout the journey, Bundleport keeps a consistent experience regardless of the upstream provider, while clients choose which touchpoint (REST, GraphQL, etc.) to integrate with.

Booking Flow Stages​

  1. Search

    • Goal: Provide a curated list of stay options for the requested destination, dates, occupancies, and policy preferences.
    • Key behaviors: Bundleport federates the request across configured suppliers, consolidates duplicate hotels, and applies business rules (e.g., cheapest per board, negotiated programs).
    • Data surfaced: Hotel descriptions, room types, board plans, cancellation policies, total price, and supplier sourcing metadata.

  2. Quote

    • Goal: Confirm that a specific option can still be sold at the advertised conditions.
    • Key behaviors: Re-validates rates, surcharges, and policies with the source supplier, catching price drifts, inventory expiration, or payment method restrictions before the shopper commits.
    • Data surfaced: Repriced totals, updated cancellation rules, payment requirements (merchant, card-on-file, pay-at-hotel), and warnings when conditions change.

  3. Book

    • Goal: Secure the reservation with the selected supplier and collect all booking references.
    • Key behaviors: Orchestrates traveller data capture, payment authorization (if required), confirmation messaging, and reference synchronization between supplier, client, and Bundleport.
    • Data surfaced: Booking status (OK, On Request, etc.), client/provide references, breakdown of rooms and travellers, financial totals, remarks, and any mandatory fee disclosures.

  4. Post-Booking Operations

    • Manage confirmations: Retrieve booking details, audit trails, or traveller documents.
    • List bookings: Filter by status, date range, or custom references to reconcile operations, reconcile revenue, or trigger notifications.
    • Cancel: Initiate cancellations (voluntary or involuntary) while honoring supplier-specific penalty logic and capturing cancellation references.

Request Design Considerations​

  • Customer experience first: Align filters and sorting with the traveler’s intent (e.g., rate fences, board inclusion, flexible vs. non-refundable).
  • Inventory freshness: Quote immediately before booking when working with dynamic inventory to avoid stale pricing or oversold rooms.
  • Payment strategy: Decide whether you operate as merchant of record, pass thru supplier payments, or mix both; Bundleport supports each model but downstream contracts dictate the right choice.
  • Reference hygiene: Persist aggregator booking IDs, supplier confirmation numbers, and your own client references. These identifiers power later cancellations, reconciliations, and support flows.
  • Operational metadata: Capture campaign IDs, loyalty markers, or distribution channel tags via optional metadata fields so downstream reporting and supplier incentives remain intact.

How Provider Integrations Respond​

Bundleport abstracts over many partner APIs (direct contracts, bedbanks, wholesalers). Suppliers vary in content depth, payment models, and booking SLAs. Bundleport normalizes:

  • Catalogs: Hotel/room naming, amenity descriptions, board codes, and policies.
  • Commercial logic: Pricing fields, rate rules, promotions, surcharges, mandatory fees.
  • Lifecycle states: Status codes for search availability, quote outcomes, booking success, cancellations, and post-sale alerts.

Clients can mix providers without changing their customer journey; the platform handles provider-specific quirks behind the scenes.

Response Anatomy​

Every response surfaces both customer-facing data and operational telemetry:

  • Customer payloads: Option lists, repriced quotes, confirmations, or cancellation receipts.
  • Operational metadata: Tracking IDs, warnings (e.g., unmapped content), and optional tracing data that summarize provider response quality.
  • Audit and compliance: Optional debug/audit payloads capture raw supplier transactions when you need deep investigations or regulatory proof.

Use warnings to detect catalog gaps (e.g., missing room mappings) early, and rely on tracing data to enforce supplier SLAs.

Best Practices​

  • Quote before Book: Reduces failed bookings and surprise price deltas when inventory moves quickly.
  • Scope searches thoughtfully: Limit to known hotel lists or apply business rules to control downstream call costs and stay within supplier rate limits.
  • Persist everything: Keep aggregator, client, and supplier references in your CRM/support tooling so agents can resolve issues quickly.
  • Enable audits on demand: Turn on debug/audit traces when onboarding new suppliers or investigating incidents; disable when not needed to reduce payload size.
  • Monitor supplier health: Track warning codes, tracing statuses, and availability hit rates to negotiate better SLAs or reroute traffic automatically.

With these practices, Bundleport delivers a consistent product journey while letting you swap or combine suppliers, tailor payment models, and retain full visibility into downstream performance.