LinksRez Platform API

Overview

The innovative LinksRez Platform API tackles the challenge of multiple travel communications standards, each with multiple versions, allowing you to quickly and confidently navigate travel integration through a scalable, enterprise solution that integrates multiple travel vertical requests into a single API.

Normalizing the Landscape

The LinksRez platform customer focuses on implementing the single Travel call, as shown in the diagram.

The nuances of each provider implementation are abstracted away from the customer by the platform, thereby reducing the time to market for integration.

Implementing the Standard

The LinksRez platform abstracts the nuances of each provider, while adhering to  the underlying standards. The LinksRez platform API implements the standards exactly as specified by the standards bodies, IATA and OTA.

Customers submit their initial search by passing the relevant details of the trip along with a filtering object that indicates which travel verticals they wish to receive available inventory for. Below is an example snippet from the API documentation that details a simple search. The customer provides the basic details of their travel dates and locations along with their desired verticals. Returns are provided in OTA 2.0 and NDC standard objects.

Search Verticals
POST /api/travel/search

Searches across multiple services for available travel accommodations, such as airplane flights or hotel rooms. The endpoint will return information regarding each service found for the given criteria, formatted to match IATA’s NDC schemas for flights and OTA 2.0 for all other services.

Request Example:

{
"location": {
   "city": "Raleigh",
    "state": "NC",
    "country": "USA"
  },
  "dates": {
    "startDate": "2020-02-10T10:30:00.123Z",
    "endDate": "2020-02-13T18:00:00.123Z "
  },
  "verticals": ["Air", "Hotel", "Car", "Golf", "Spa"]
}

Example Response:

Status: 200

{
  "verticals": {
    "car": GetGroundOffersRS,
    "hotel": HospitalityDescriptiveInfoRS,
    "golf": GetOffersRS,
    "air": AirShoppingRS,
    "spa": HospitalityDescriptiveInfoRS
  }
}

Additional options are provided, allowing the customer to pass in their own standard OTA and NDC request documents providing a finer grain filtering capability.

To expedite adoption, LinksRez ensures the Platform API utilizes models produced with the Open Travel Model Designer App, commonly referred to as the OTM-DE. From the User Guide

The OpenTravel Model (OTM) simplifies defining XML Schemas and messages that conform to the OpenTravel 2.0 XML Schema Best Practices. The model defines an OTM Library as a single file that contains metadata and definitions of model objects.

More information can be found on the Open Travel Developer Network website at here.

Summary

By centralizing the vertical integration problem under one engineering effort, the LinksRez Platform API reduces complexity for its customers allowing faster time to market and allowing its customers to concentrate on their core mission of servicing the traveler.