The Importance of API Integrations in the Travel Sector

Customers looking to make travel bookings prefer ‘all-in-one-place platforms for their bookings rather than switching their apps for different requirements. In a bid to make travel experiences easier for the customer, travel-related enterprises are increasingly working alongside other organizations through application programming interface (API) integrations. 

As travel and tourism is a global sector, it involves API integrations of various types. In the past few years, API integrations have transformed how travel crm businesses are utilizing the content and resources from various sources and creating a great user experience for their travelers. SaaS customer support automation platforms like Kapture CRM help these travel enterprises serve their customers better by facilitating seamless integrations with the most commonly used and loved platforms. 

So what exactly is a travel API? 

API is a bunch of web services, which facilitate access to data sources that can be helpful for travel businesses in sustaining their customers and delivering smooth experiences. This is generally done by providing information like hotel booking information, flight information, transport option, traffic conditions, and more on a single platform.

APIs are also used to create or modify orders as well as manage payments by interacting with other service providers. 

Global Distribution System (GDS) APIs

GDS API acts as an aggregator of travel-related data that serves booking websites and OTAs. These APIs provide data and enable reservations of airline seats, car rentals, hotels, cruises, ferries, railways, ground transport among many other things. This helps resellers of travel services to connect to one API rather than having to interface with each individual service provider. Some of the world-renowned GDS API providers include:

1. Amadeus – facilitates data and reservations for hotels, airlines, car rentals, airport private shuttles or taxi transfers, cruises and even travel insurance. 
2. Sabre API – Provides data and enables reservations for airlines, car rentals and railway, cruises, hotels, as well as management of traveler profiles and end-to-end trips.
3. Worldspan – offers worldwide electronic distribution of travel inventory, connectivity and e-commerce capabilities to travel agencies, corporations and travel services providers.
4. Galileo – Galileo GDS integrated solution connects businesses through multiple travels. It helps in dealing with airline inventory management solutions and airline consolidation for international airlines.
5. Travelport API – Offers data from three different GDS systems—Apollo, Worldspan, and Galileo. Provides an Air API, Rail API, room reservations, and a fares and ancillaries module.

Hotel API 

There are several large providers of hotel room inventories in specific locations or niches. By connecting to their APIs, you can get room information, booking information, and also handle reservations and cancellations across their inventories.  Some well-known hotel API providers that can you integrate with seamlessly include:

1. Booking.com – helps to query rooms, price, facilities, policies and other information from multiple hotels around the world as on the official site (booking.com).
2. AxisRooms –  is a distribution platform that enables hotels to push their inventory and prices on a real-time basis to multiple OTAs like Makemytrip, Goibibo, etc. 
3. Expedia – offers data on booking availability, retrieval,, hotel lists, itineraries, reservation management, room images and hotel info, payment types, natural language hotel search, travel deals, etc.

Role CRM in integrating travel applications 

Travel is a dynamic sector and it is important for travel business management to keep up with changing trends in order to create and deliver seamless travel experiences. The need of the hour for most travel enterprises (of all sizes) is an intelligent CRM. 

Kapture CRM can integrate with multiple platforms to help boost connectivity and leverage the power of APIs optimally. 

Benefits of leveraging Kapture’s travel API integrations

1. Save precious time – APIs provided by travel companies can be used by developers to add flight, hotel, rental car booking, and other capabilities to their applications. This helps in saving time that otherwise would be spent on collecting all the relevant data inventory manually from different sources. 
2. Increased traffic to your website and app: Online travel agencies(OTAs) and travel firms generally have a large inventory of flights, hotels, activities, taxi service, etc, which they might have collected from many APIs of different companies. This availability of data at fingertips in one location helps in gaining additional traffic. 
3. Delivering seamless booking experiences – Third-party API integrations permit travel agencies to facilitate uninterrupted hotel booking, flight booking experiences as it centralizes the booking process for the end-user. 
4. Increased customer retention – Whenever a customer is looking to book a hotel or a flight on your travel site, then API integrations will assure you that they won’t be redirected to another site and the payment will be collected by your travel agent only. 

Kapture CRM is an advanced customer support automation platform that facilitates seamless integration with over 1000 platforms. Reach out to us and book a demo to understand how Kapture can help take your travel business to the next level.