The booking lifecycle
Confirm, book, amend and cancel — and what to do when the price moves.
By Ipponsoft
Search is a read. Booking is not. This guide covers the transactional half of the ApiXV flow and the failure cases worth designing for before you ship.
Confirmation before booking
You never book directly from a search result. Availability is a snapshot, and between returning an option and committing to it, the underlying rate can change or disappear.
Confirmation is the step that resolves this. You confirm a specific option_uid and
receive a quote_uid — a priced, committed offer.
Deltaprice
Prices move between quote and book. deltaprice is how you express the variation you are
willing to accept, as a percentage, an absolute tolerance, or both.
- Set it too tight and you reject bookings that would have completed at a trivially different price.
- Set it too loose and you book at rates that destroy your margin.
- Set it to zero and any movement at all fails the booking.
There is no correct value. It is a commercial decision, and it belongs in configuration rather than in code.
Client reference
Attach a client_reference to every booking. It is an arbitrary string that travels with
the reservation, and it is what lets you cross-reference an ApiXV booking against your own
order in support conversations and reconciliation.
Set it to something meaningful in your own systems. You will want it during your first incident, and it cannot be added retrospectively.
After the booking
- List bookings returns current and historic reservations.
- Amendment changes an existing booking.
- Cancellation cancels one and returns a
cancellation_uid.
Cancellation policies come from the supplier, not from us. Surface the policy attached to an option at the point the customer commits — not after.
Testing without booking
Booking is disabled in the sandbox. Steps one through four — datasets, hotels, options and confirmation — all behave as they do in production, so the majority of the integration can be built and tested before certification.
Plan for the booking path to be exercised first against production with a real transaction, and schedule that deliberately rather than discovering it on launch day.