For users of the TourCMS tour operator ecommerce platform

Website search functionality through TourCMS API - 200+ apartments?

Dear TourCMS support,

We would like to use TourCMS for online booking of seaside private apartments. Most of the apartment houses have 2-3 individual apartments (although there are some buildings with many apartments / rooms – like small hotels). At present we offer for rent about 70 houses in Croatia i.e. about 200+ individual apartments total.

It is absolutely necessary for our clients to be able to search on the apartment / room level by several criteria. I have seen the hotel API examples here - http://www.tourcms.com/support/api/mp/demos/hotel.php. So, I suppose, it possible to organize under TourCMS? Or TourCMS is not really intended for such applications? Our apartment database will grow, are we not going to run into TourCMS limitations?

Regards,

Evgeny

Hiking Croatia

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on July 12, 2011 at 9:47am

Hi Evgeny

Good set of questions

The key difference between an apartment and, say, a hotel is that a hotel will have multiple rooms - so an individual booking may not change the overall availability of that property for those dates..... but a booking for an apartment DOES change the availability (for those dates)

Should be fine using TourCMS.

Only question would be whether to use tour freesale functionality (with the no overlap rule so TourCMS stops over booking) OR whether you use the hotel functionality. Could use a mixture of both (e.g. apartment houses could be setup as a hotel with rooms)

We have a new API call coming shortly that will make it easier to pull content from BOTH product types at the same time

Limitations, if any, will be around functionality NOT around the number of products you have.

Best wishes

Alex

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Permalink Reply by Hiking Croatia on July 12, 2011 at 11:02am

Alex, thank you for the reply. Regarding setting up apartment houses as a hotels with rooms – it looks logical but in this case we cannot search individual rooms. Or am I wrong? The filter functionality is available for travel products (tours/hotels) – not for their components, like hotel rooms, isn't it? In fact we planned to enter individual apartments as hotels (or tours). Are we on the right track?

Evgeny

hikingcroatia

adriabestdeals

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Permalink Reply by Paul on July 12, 2011 at 11:46am

Hi Evgeny,

Best way to evaluate is probably going to be configuring one or two of each type (just a few rooms / dates) and then making a few tests, that way you quickly check everything works as you'd like. The hotel examples you have linked to are a good way to test the web side of things as they can be placed on your web server and set to use your API details.

If you had your Apartment houses set up as Hotels and then each apartment set up as a "room" you could use the Specific availability search to let your customers find an available "room" (apartment), you could then give them the option of adding on extra apartments in the booking engine.

Fundamentally though it should work, feel free to fire an email to support if you get stuck.

Paul

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Permalink Reply by Hiking Croatia on July 12, 2011 at 11:25am

Alex, speaking of the search functionality – the clients will use several criteria, for example:

1) studio/one/two/tree bedroom apt,

2) air-conditioning yes/no,

3) distance to the sea – 100/200/300/more m,

4) floor – 0/1/2

Is it technically possible to implement this using API and TourCMS filter functionality? If yes, can you please recommend people who can make it for us. I don’t think we have sufficient skills in our team.