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What are APIs in travel booking apps?
What are some popular flight booking APIs?
What are some hotel booking APIs?
What are some travel insurance APIs?
Digitization has impacted almost everything in the world, the Tour and Travel industry isn’t an exception. Moreover, technological advancements are pushing modern apps toward personalization.
For example, the apps like Booking.com, Expedia, and Make My Trip can be seen as “all-in-one-place” platforms, where the traveler can make flight reservations, book hotel, taxi, or bus, and much more. Also, such apps provide personalized offers making them most suitable even for the average traveler.
The answer is here, the travel industry is now more open to sharing data with other similar applications, allowing third-party apps to share data with each other through APIs, all without switching an application.
If you are looking for a way to build such an app with multiple functionalities this article is for you. Here we will explore the essential APIs you need to build the best travel booking application.
APIs are the application programming interface that can be used to share data between the applications. You can make your travel booking app work smarter by integrating the APIs like flight and hotel booking to weather and currency conversion that ultimately helps the app to adapt to consumer expectation rise.
Here are some popular ones:
These APIs provide access to real-time flight schedules, availability, and pricing data, and some examples of such APIs are Sabre, Amadeus, and Travelport.
Generally, there are two main types of systems from which you can get help in the travel search.
1. Global distribution system: It is built on top of aggregators, and is the main data source and the reservation point of contact for online travel agencies. They provide APIs for reservation support into the OTA booking engine. Here are the big players/API providers:
2. Online travel agencies: If you are looking for a pocket-friendly option just partner with other online travel agencies that offer affiliate programs and APIs. Some OTAs help developers in different ways after the booking is complete such as Flight departure notifications, Tracks flight status, and Flight price predictors.
These APIs provide access to real-time hotel availability, pricing, and other information. Some examples of such APIs are Booking.com, Expedia, and Hotel.com. To implement the functionality in your app you can collect data from multiple sources like hotel wholesalers, and aggregators.
The aggregators here are the GDSs and the connectivity providers. Even though GDSs are mainly focused on Flight booking it also provides features for Hotel Booking with APIs. And the connectivity providers get the data for hotel reservations, room availability, and other things through different sources.
Find out the list of APIs here for integrating hotel booking functionality:
These APIs provide access to real-time rental information, pricing, and availability. Similar to Flight booking and hotel booking services GDS systems and Online travel agencies also support Car Rental services by providing APIs and other support services.
Some examples of such APIs are API by Rentalcars.com which is owned by Booking.com, CarTrawler , and Avis .
Travel insurance APIs allow developers to access and integrate travel insurance data into their applications, platforms, or websites. These APIs provide a wide range of functionalities such as policy management, quote generation, claim submission, and customer management.
By using travel insurance APIs, developers can provide their customers with a seamless, end-to-end travel insurance experience, without having to build the entire system from scratch.
Weather APIs provide developers with easy access to real-time weather data and related information that can be used to build a variety of weather-related applications. These APIs offer a range of functionalities, including current conditions, hourly and daily forecasts, radar and satellite imagery, and more.
Developers can choose the best API that fits their needs and provides the functionalities they need to create weather-related applications. Following are some of the popular examples:
Map APIs mapping services allow developers to integrate interactive maps into their applications. Map APIs provide access to maps, satellite imagery, geocoding, routing, and other location-based services that can be used to enhance the functionality of an application.
Here are some of the top Map APIs available in the market:
The APIs we have covered for the Travel Booking Application in the article are just the tip of the iceberg. There are more such APIs you can use to add specific features to your Travel app.
However, while choosing one should be specific about your travel business scope, API popularity, API documentation, compliance, and customization flexibility.
And if you are looking for the simplest way to build an “all in one” travel booking application by integrating different APIs we have discussed above, then DhiWise can help you. It simplifies everything from UI designing to coding to API integration and deployment.
Read our detailed article on how to build a travel booking app with DhiWise.
