How Hotelbeds disrupted the travel sector with their REST APIs
Hotelbeds is the world’s number one bedbank and a business-to-business (B2B) provider to the global travel industry. The group, originally from Spain, connects and efficiently distributes a portfolio of over 120k properties from 120 source markets in 185 countries worldwide.
The Group’s proprietary technology helps providers of travel services distribute their offering to travel sellers globally via an easy-to-use, advanced technology platform that increases reach, revenue and yield for both the provider and the seller.
Through their technology, the group handles around 46k daily net bookings of hotel rooms, activities and transfers.
In 2015, after identifying a significant opportunity to help partners integrate with their system more quickly and seamlessly, Hotelbeds launched APItude. This RESTful API suite includes three different APIs (Booking, Content and Cache), allowing developers to code travel websites or applications, and instantly access Hotelbeds’ hotel properties database, which includes over 120,000 hotels, 20,000 transfer routes and 12,000 activities.
This week we chatted with Carlos Bautista San Miguel, API Distribution Manager at Hotelbeds. Carlos led the migration from Hotelbeds’ old API into the new suite, and is a strong advocate for open APIs, and specifically opening up the travel sector to developers.
¿What is Apitude’s objective? ¿What inspired you to start the program?
Hotelbeds launched APItude in 2015, during World Travel Market. It was designed to make the integration process between systems, websites and applications easier and faster. Hotelbeds’ API was created to support the development of new travel websites or mobile apps, enhancing the developer experience.
¿What is the typical type of organization consuming your API?
APItude is used by tour operators and online travel agencies that want to integrate our products with their systems, applications and websites. Also it is geared towards technology platform companies that work with multiple clients in the travel sector. Among the latter we can mention Qtech, an Indian-based company that started working with our API suite last September.
(Qtech is a leading tech provider in the travel sector. This partnership allowed both Hotelbeds and Qtech to benefit their mutual clients with a faster booking experience, including multilingual information)
¿Can you mention examples cool integrations that have been made by Hotelbeds’ partners?
Hotelbeds has organized and also participated in several hackathons in which it has offered its distribution API. Last year we organized a hackathon together with Tnooz, an American travel-tech publication, and the university of the Balearic Islands. Recently, we also participated in #HackaTrips, the first sustainable tourism hackathon held at FITUR (the annual Spanish tourism industry trade show). In all of these events, innovative ideas have emerged and it has been possible to test, improve and expand the functionalities of APItude.
The winning project for #Hackatrips, called Pequeño Encanto, developed a web and mobile app to help give more visibility to tiny villages in Spain, which due to lack of resources are becoming deserted. The application helps users search and learn about interest points in these villages, and book hotel rooms through APItude’s technology.
What challenges do you face in terms of growing and supporting your API community?
Hotelbeds comes from a fairly closed B2B environment. By making an open API we have changed our attention model from a tailor-made closed service to an open support system. Nevertheless we want to evolve this support model to a self-service model. That means that all developers that use our API suite will have full access to our materials, access to the code examples, and tutorials uploaded on our website. In this way we will minimize the help and assistance they need.
What do you expect to improve by using Hitch?
Giving developers and partners the possibility to subscribe to our API on Hitch will allow us to better support them by providing an automated changelog. Also by listing APItude on the Hitch catalogue we hope to give our APIs more visibility within the development community.
Any new features coming up this year?
We are currently working on implementing APItude phase-two with APItude Cloud, which anticipates the needs of customers for faster response times delivered via a decentralized server structure offered by the cloud. APItude cloud will function on servers based in Asia and the Americas markets, to be launched by late 2017.
Also we are working to incorporate new functionalities in the BookingAPI and ContentAPI, these will include booking modifications, more advanced filters to help clients find exactly what they need, and the introduction of e-vouchers.
APItude is now using Hitch to better support their community. Follow them now and start getting updates. Want to sign up to APItude? Check out their developer portal.
