Shopping Offer Service
Overview
To book an itinerary, you will first need to get and select a suitable offer that meets your customer’s travelling needs.
We offer diversified travel options including flights, trains and buses (collectively referred to as transportations). As long as these options are available for your specified itinerary, you can choose anyone of them, but we also offer combined travel options to help personalize your travel plans, e.g. flights plus trains, flights plus buses. You can choose combined travel options if you like.
For convenience, here we will take flights as an example to illustrate how to use our diversified services.
1. Request offers
To search for an offer, you’ll need to create an offer request.
An offer request describes the passengers and where and when they want to travel.
It may also include additional filters, e.g. flight only, flights plus trains, a particular cabin to travel in, the preferred airline, non-stop.
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Any ancillary products may also be shown together with different offers. You can book ancillary products either when you are booking flights or after you have booked flights. How to book ancillary products will be elaborated on in Book ancillary products. |
2. Get itineraries
After you have requested offers, we will respond to your search criteria, which may return different itineraries and their respective SearchCriteriaToken.
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If there is no itinerary returned, you may need change your search criteria, e.g. use fewer filters or clear all, change origin or destination. Then request again. |
Each itinerary includes flights you can buy from an airline or airlines at a particular price that meet your search criteria.
You will see journeys inside each itinerary. Each journey will also include a list of one or more specific flights (also called segments) that the airline is offering to get the passengers where they want to go.
3. Select your itinerary
After we have returned a list of available itineraries for your search criteria, you now need to choose a suitable itinerary from a certain airline or airlines.
Note that some itineraries returned may include more than one segments or more than one airlines, please select a suitable itinerary that fits with your customer’s travel plans.
4. Select an offer
Once you have selected a suitable itinerary, you will then receive a list of available offers and their respective OfferToken for your selected itinerary.
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If there is no offer returned for your selected itinerary, you can select another itinerary and try again. |
These offers are from different suppliers and they differ from each other in cabin classes or services provided. Please pay close attention to offer details such as applicable cancellation and refund rules, baggage allowance and travelling requirements that passengers must meet (e.g. a visa, a negative nucleic acid test result ).
Please select a suitable offer that meets your customers' travelling needs.
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When you select an offer to create an order with us, we will confirm this offer with its supplier by using its
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If the seat is not available, meaning the offer is unavailable, you will see a prompt and can not go on to book the offer. Under this circumstance, you need to select another offer/itinerary.
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If the seat is available, but the price has changed, you can either use the latest price for booking or simply select another offer/itinerary.
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If the price is the same and the seat is also available, then you can successfully select this offer and go on to create an order with us.
Usually, an offer is only available to create an order for a limited time before it expires, typically within 20 minutes.
5. Get a single offer
After you have successfully selected an offer, you will get the complete, up-to-date information about it such as applicable cancellation and refund rules, baggage allowance and travelling requirements that passengers must meet (e.g. a visa, a negative nucleic acid test result ).
Due to limitations in airlines' systems, you may see changes to the offer now (e.g a changed tax).
Additionally, you may receive information that may have not been included in the original offer such as baggage allowances.
During this step, there’s a possibility that some of the service information will have changed, so you should always use the latest data (e.g prices, rules) when creating an order.
Next, you need to finish creating an order with us. Please refer to Booking Service.
Shopping offer service schema
To see all of the options you can provide and everything that we’ll return back, please refer to Shopping Offer Service.