The Partner Integration Team has put together a list of common questions we get from our partners working on development to the SMX for Apps API.
We ask that you bookmark this page and refer to it regularly, as many questions you might have are likely to be answered here. Below we've broken up the FAQ into sections that relate to the different parts of the API.
Reservation API
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| title | Do I need to certify to receive data from each data publisher individually? |
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No. SMX is built on the mentality of 'develop once, connect to many'. Once your connection is certified with SMX you will be able to connect to all available data publishers. SMX will handle any message conversion required. |
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| title | How are messages sent? |
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SMX uses SOAP XML messages to transmit data to the connecting application. You can find samples of these messages in the Reservation XML Samples section. |
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| title | When will I receive reservation data? |
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Data publishers should send through an updated version of the reservation message when it is modified within their system. This can include events such as a reservation status being adjusted to In-house (guest is checked in), a guest has been moved to another room, or a modification was received from the booking source (ie: Booking.com). |
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| title | How do I know what was modified? |
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Data publishers will provide the full details of the reservation as it stands after the modification has been made. This means you will also receive the complete reservation details again. It is important to note that SMX will not compare the changes that have been made and cannot provide a 'summary' of the changes. |
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| title | How do I receive historical data? |
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In most scenarios, the data publisher can simply push the data through to SMX and it will be passed on to you. However, you will need to discuss with the data publisher to determine if they are able to push through historical data. |
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| title | Can you resend reservations? |
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Reservations can be resent upon request by the SMX support team. |
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| title | What is the difference between the ResGuest and ResGlobalInfo profiles? |
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ResGuest: This will contain the details of the 'staying' guest if provided by the data publisher.
ResGlobalInfo: This will contain the details of the 'booking' customer, and may also contain details business, wholesaler or travel agent information
It is a good idea to ensure you are able to use both the ResGuest and ResGlobalInfo profiles, as it cannot be guaranteed that both will always be sent. |
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| title | I didn't receieve data that I am after. How can I get the missing data? |
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SMX can only provide you with reservation data that is sent by the data publisher. It is expected that your system will be able to return an appropriate error message in the event that a reservation message cannot be processed. Please refer to the Error Handling section of the documentation for more detail. |
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| title | Can I send data back to the publisher? |
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Not yet. However, this is planned for a future enhancement. |
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| title | Can you send reservation data in a JSON format? |
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No. SMX is derived from the Open Travel Alliance (OTA) industry standards, which uses SOAP XML. At the time SMX was created, JSON was not a supported message format. However, there are plans to introduce a JSON version of the reservation API in the future. |
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| title | Why do we need to provide a hotel code to SMX? |
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We ask you to provide us with an identifier for the hotelier within your system as this ensures that the HotelCode attribute within each message is unique to your system and in a format you are able to handle. As we connect to multiple data publishers, there is the possibility that duplicate codes will exist between these data publishers (ie: HOTEL1 may exist in 2 different data publishers). |
Reservation API Integration Process
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| title | Could you give me more information about the Certification process? |
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Certification process is very straightforward. We will create some reservations (some of them will be modified and/or cancelled) and will verify that all of them will trigger either a successful response or a meaningful error response. Your responses should be well in line with our OTA_HotelResNotifRS specifications. We will also test sending through our Minimum and Maximum content samples. If some reservations trigger an error (for instance, due to missing data), this error must be as eloquent as possible and it should not impact the http status that should remain as 200. If you have server level issues, then it is OK to respond with HTTP standard error codes. See our Error Handling specs for more details. The only thing that is required from your side is to leave your endpoint up and running until we complete certification. If there's an issue with your responses or some of the reservations could not be delivered and we don't understand why, we will let you know and once it has been fixed, we will resume the certification. This means you can "fail" it any number of times, the important thing is that at the end of this process we fixed all the issues. |
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| title | Are all PMSes listed on your website able to connect through SMX? |
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The PMSes listed on our website are connected to our Channel Manager, but not all have an agreement to publish any data to SMX. pmsXchange and SMX are 2 different products that need to be built separately, and being in our PMS List in our web, does not imply that the PMS is available in SMX. The PMSs connected to SMX will have a ‘Hotel App Store’ logo. You can also find the list here: SMX PMSs Reservations Capabilities Table |
Availability and Rate API