For users of the TourCMS tour operator ecommerce platform

Idiots guide to use of tour availabilty API?

First, my apologies if this is already clearly explained somewhere but I have not been able to find it.

We use TourCMS as our booking database and the online booking engine and the administration function are both used only by our customer care staff. We do not (yet) allow passengers to directly book their tours.

Instead we display the available spaces on all of our tours on our webs site (content is not driven by TourCMS), using the real time availability in TourCMS but obtaining it through a sort of screen scraping mechanism since it was implemented before the Marketplace and APIs etc. Passengers can select the month and tour they want and see the avaiable spaces then submit an email request to book it.

We want to update this to use the tour availability API XML call ( /c/tour/datesprices/dep/show ), but I am fairly non-technical and I am struggling to give clear instructions to my web developer (who is not familiar with TourCMS) on what he needs to do to implement it.

We have scoured the examples and the other info, but there are references to logging on which I did not think was necessary as I recall a previous post saying this API worked independently of Marketplace (I may be wrong) and in any case is it an agent login we need, or out admin interface login, or an FTP login or some other login etc.... These are basic and perhaps very obvious questions, but I cannot find the answer.

Can you please give a simple "5 step" process of exactly what needs to be done for someone who is not familiar with TourCMS, but is a very competent web developer (not me!), to call the API to get availability for one or all of our tours?

Thanks!
Brad Lowe

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Paul on July 27, 2010 at 4:30pm

Hi Brad,
If your developer is using PHP then the best page for them to look at would be the PHP wrapper page, this abstracts the complexity of using the API.

I have just updated this with a ~~"5 step"~~ "4 step" :) guide. Step 1 would be of interest to yourself, Step 2 onwards would be more for your developer.

Hope that helps, do feel free to ask if not.

Working on improving the documentation of the "Departures" and "Freesale" pages to get them to the same standard as the other method calls, will update here once that's done.

Paul

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Permalink Reply by Paul on July 27, 2010 at 4:54pm

I should add that the current Departures and Freesale calls are designed for those pulling information into a database / local file at regular intervals. If instead you are looking to use the API for live pricing / availability information then do let us know.

Paul

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Permalink Reply by Brad Lowe on July 27, 2010 at 10:57pm

Hi Paul,
We are looking to use them for live API availability information - I did not realise that the intent was more for batch extracts. We essentially are reproducing the functionality of Step 1 of the Online Booking engine but with more flexibility to fit into the rest of our web page.
Brad

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Permalink Reply by Brad Lowe on July 29, 2010 at 12:54am

Our Web Developer has asked if it would be possible to add a 2 new functions to the API:

1) A function that works like "/c/tour/datesprices/dep/show.xml" but where we can specify at least an end date for departures, but more appropriately would be both a start and end date so only departures between the dates would be returned - this would result in a much smaller data set being returned and I would think be more efficient for their servers when sites only require a limited dataset

2) A function that would return just one departure, where we would supply the TourID, Channel and Departure code and the API would return the same data send in the "/c/tour/datesprices/dep/show.xml" but just for that one departure. This would allow us to get up to date availability for a specific departure without having to pull data on every departure

3) And I wondered if we can specify a month like in Step 1 of the online booking engine?

Any/all of these would help make the API more efficient for non-batch use.

Brad

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on July 29, 2010 at 7:20am

Hi Brad
Yes - these are good plans - we actually have that for hotel product types - but not yet for departures / freesale

http://www.tourcms.com/support/api/mp/hotel_search.php
Its on our list.

Thanks. Alex

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Permalink Reply by Terry Estioko on March 11, 2011 at 12:59am

Hi,

We're developing a new TourCMS site and I just came across the same circumstances as Brad. We would like to use the Departures and Freesale API call with PHP to get a live dataset of future booking dates and booking links for the specified tour. We do not want to iframe the 1st page of the booking engine. I don't see any straight-forward way to do this.

This seems really easy to do when using Tour CMS templates, i.e:

$has_departure = <$TourCMStour output="t_has_departure"$>;
if ($has_departure =='1'){

...output

}

It's now over 6 months later since the original post. Anything new or any recommendations on how to do this?

-terry

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on March 14, 2011 at 6:20pm

Hi Terry

Just because the thread hasn't been updated it doesn't mean we are not working on something (or haven't changed something in the meantime)

What we are working on is a new pot of dates - that could be departures, freesale or hotel availability. These would, via a simple, single, API call, be easily put on a website

I think that will do it. Its timetabled for March and has to happen as we have a number of projects that are relying on it

You can use the template CMS system to do this - but not the live API (easily). Let me see what I can move around in the development queue though.