Guidelines#

Redirection flow / Booking Flow#

Amadeus Discover Consumer API is designed for various actors in the travel industry—such as travel agencies, airlines, and hotels—or any entity aiming to enhance their offerings with destination activities for travelers.

The API supports two distinct distribution flows: Redirection Flow and Booking Flow.

The Redirection Flow involves redirecting travelers to an external booking URL, where they complete the booking on an external system like Viator or Holibob. In this flow, the external booking system manages the entire booking process, including payment, voucher issuance, and after-sales support. At the end of each month, you will receive a booking report, and commissions are paid after the activity has taken place.

The Booking Flow allows you to integrate the booking process directly into your UI or application by using various API endpoints (such as checking availability, selecting options, describing participants, confirming bookings, and sending vouchers). In this scenario, you handle the payment process and maintain full control over the booking, receiving live booking references and details. You are responsible for all traveler-facing activities, including sending vouchers, managing booking references, and handling cancellations.

Flow comparison#

Redirection Flow

Booking Flow

Traveler flow for booking

Traveler is redirected to an external booking link to book the activity.

Booking steps are triggered from your system. Travelers stay in your ecosystem for the full booking flow.

Merchant of records

External Booking System (ex Viator, Holibob)

Your company

Level of access

Available with basic Consumer API account

Requires specific level of access

Eligible content

100% content

30% content

Starting with the Redirection Flow provides a rapid time to market, enabling you to quickly validate the value of offering destination activities to your customers. As your integration matures and the value proposition is proven, the solution can easily evolve to incorporate the Booking Flow. This progression allows you to start with a simpler setup and gradually move towards a more integrated and controlled booking process, enhancing the customer experience and retaining more control over transactions.

To begin your integration, it is crucial to determine whether you intend to use the Redirection Flow or the Booking Flow. This decision will guide the setup process and ensure that you implement the API in a manner that aligns with your business needs and capabilities.

FIND / SHARE / BOOK#

The flow with Amadeus Discover API can be split in 3 steps :

  1. FIND relevant products

  2. SHARE products with travelers

  3. BOOK products

FIND relevant products#

Amadeus Discover API proposes different endpoints, covering diverse use cases to find the most relevant products in your context. All these endpoints return a list of products corresponding to the search criteria, including all details you might need about the products to expose them to travelers (title, description, images, booking URL, duration, geolocation, taxonomy, opening hours, cancellation policy, min / max price, additional information, booking engine…)

The Search Products endpoints enable users to perform customized searches on the Amadeus Discover platform using a variety of parameters. These parameters can be combined to refine the search, including criteria such as taxonomy, geolocation with a radius, country, city, ratings, free text in titles/descriptions, and booking engines. Several endpoints are available to best fit your specific use case:

  • Search Products (:ref:`product_search_endpoint`): This is the most flexible search endpoint, ideal for live searches. It allows users to perform comprehensive searches using a wide range of criteria.

  • Search Products by IATA Code (:ref:`search_by_iata_endpoint`): This endpoint is particularly useful for users who work with IATA codes, enabling searches based on these specific codes.

  • Search Diff Products (:ref:`product_diff_endpoint`): This endpoint is designed for users who intend to maintain a local copy of the search results in their own database. It is especially useful for post-processing data. By inputting a specific date, users can receive only the products that are new, have changed, or have been deleted since that date. This helps manage smaller volumes of data, making it easier to implement regular ingestion of Amadeus Discover Platform content.

The Recommendation Engine endpoint allows to obtain relevant products based on a context. Depending on trip context (leisure, business, staycation), traveler type (solo, family, couple, group), activity risk level (safe, moderate, dangerous) and interests, the endpoint will return different products, with the highest expected conversion rate.

SHARE products with travelers#

In order to expose the products that have been identified to the Traveler, two options are available:

  • Expose the products in your own UI. In the search results, all required elements are available to expose the products in your own UI. Title, Description, Images, Opening Hours, Cancellation policy, Ratings, and many more elements can be used to build products overview and detail pages in your own UI, ensuring an integrated user experience.

  • Use Amadeus Discover Traveler Application. Amadeus Discover has developed a white label Traveler facing application, that can be used to expose products to traveler with minimal integration efforts. Standalone links can be generated to be shared to travelers via email or QR codes. The application is also available as widget to be integrated directly in your UI. Amadeus Discover Traveler Application has been designed with a User Experience focus to optimize the travelers experience and boost bookings. See an example.

BOOK products#

The API supports two distinct distribution flows: Redirection flow / Booking Flow.

  • To implement the Redirection Flow, you just need to retrieve from the products response the parameter “booking URL” in the language you are targeting and implement the redirection to the link in your own UI. The booking URL includes a parameter to identify that the bookings are generated from your traffic. Note that if you are using Amadeus Discover Traveler Application, the links are already implemented in the UI with the same tracking mechanism.

  • To implement the Booking Flow, you will need to implement the Booking Flow endpoints and orchestrate the flow in your UI (Booking flow).