Getting Started Guide

After signing the commercial agreement, you will be able to start the integration with our API. The following information will help you understand the process you need to go through to complete your application, and the dedicated service we provide to all our Direct Connect API customers to help you achieve this.

Documentation and Guidelines

We ask our customers to free up some time to read all of our documentation before starting your integration. This is to get a good idea of the wide spectrum of features we support.

Our mission is content aggregation - to organize and deliver to you data from a variety of rail and airline suppliers, and to reflect their products in our API. We've done our best to simplify the booking flow for our customers, and in the same time to keep the unique behavior of the products provided by each supplier. The more time you spend in this initial stage planning your application design, the more informed your decisions will be in later stages of your development.

Our booking flow has 4 stages:

Search - StartRouting and CheckRouting commands - sending search parameters and getting results
Details - ProcessDetails command - selecting the flight you want
Terms - ProcessTerms command - providing traveller and billing details
Booking - StartBooking and CheckBooking - submitting the booking to the supplier

A high level description of the flow is described on the Search and Book API page. It is helpful to go through each of these steps and submit sample request and responses through our XML test tool to get a detailed understanding of the processes.

The specific commands for each stage are specified on the XML Request and Response page.

Specific reference related to the Routing in the Search stage can be found on the Route Lists, Routing and Airports page.

Detailed description of the booking stages can be found on the XML Bookings and Handling page.

Documentations of other sections of our API can be found here with our general guidelines.

Click here to see our list of the suppliers we support and their unique features.

Another useful document is our FAQs page on which we have tried to elaborate on a number of API areas that have needed clarification in the past.

There are some sample java libraries available here.

Support

As you'll find, the features of our API are varied and there are many levels in which a customer can integrate with us. This mainly depends on the nature of your product and what you wish to deliver to your end-users. We will do our best to help you understand how you can use the API for your unique needs. We will also help you with the do's and the don'ts which we ask you to follow.

Our API support team is here to answer your questions: apisupport@travelfusion.com

If you cannot find the answers that you’re looking for elsewhere in our documentation, then please use this email address. If your query is not technical, then we will direct you to the appropriate function in our organisation and make sure you have all the information you need to make your technical, product and commercial decisions.

We provide online Reports Portal to help you manage your account, the relevant guides can be found here.

The integration process

We will do our best to give you fast dedicated support as you go along, but the time it will take to complete your integration is up to you. The following are the main stages in the integration process

Studying our API and the features it provides
Receiving your account logins for the API and Reports Portal.
Integrating with the Search stage
Integrating with the Booking stage and testing is with our FakeBooking functionality. As you are integrating against our live environment, we will not be able to refund any real bookings that you make. We also do not allow load tests at any point.
Completing our Going Live Check List - a questionnaire designed to make sure you've made the right choices in the course of the integration. We advise our customers to check their designs and integrations with the Going Live Check List to ensure that they have adhered to our best practices and to the documentation guidelines. We may ask you to make changes to your integration, if we identify any show stoppers.
Making a test booking on your staging environment. We would like to access your staging environment and try a few test bookings, to familiarise ourselves with your product and the unique way in which you chose to integrate our booking flow into your product. We will ask you to set up a 1 hour online session with our team, and observe your command flow together.
Setting up operational points of contact - we will need to establish the operational, technical and booking support channels in your organization. We will also introduce our own operational points of contact to you.
At this point we will set you up with access to Jira, our bug reporting system. We recommend that you provide a complete set of XML logs when reporting issues to our team, without which we will not be able to investigate the problem.
All live booking support issues are managed directly by our booking support team, who are expected to work closely with your designated call/support centres. Your teams should be able to access the bookings made under your account using the Travelfusion Reports Portal.
Granting permission to go live - we give you the green light to switch on live booking traffic. In this stage our team will be monitoring your bookings and traffic.

After going live

After going live, you'll receive support from our Accounts management team. We monitor our customers' traffic closely and alert them on any issues we see.

We also provide a Market Analysis report to you - online reports that will help you find out how to maximise your ability to book with rail and airline suppliers, based on your various markets. Access to our reporting system is only provided after your application integration has gone live. More information about this can be found here.

Billing reports will be sent to you on a quarterly basis.