About Expedia
Expedia Group is an American online travel booking company for leisure and business travel. It unites travel fare aggregators and metasearch engines, such as Expedia.com, Vrbo, Hotels.com, Trivago, CarRentals.com, Orbitz, and Hotwire.com. With over 20 years of experience on the front line of the travel niche, Expedia may know everything when it comes to starting and growing a travel business.
Expedia Partner Solutions is a B2B partnership brand of Expedia Group that aims to contribute to the growth of travel partners around the world through the company’s advanced technology, travel supply and support. As an EPS partner, you will be able to get support from the industry experts, as well as benefit from the company’s sophisticated technology and an ever-expanding array of solutions.
Advantages of Partnering With Expedia
From growing your brand to improving customer experience and driving sales, you can encounter plenty of advantages by partnering with Expedia. Here are some of them:
- Exceptionally broad range of travel services: over 700,000 properties, 500 airlines, 200,000 activities and 175 car rental companies.
- Competitive rates and availability for travel offerings worldwide.
- High-quality content pool to help partners drive conversions.
- Cutting-edge software, from customizable travel API to ready-built hotel booking template, etc.
- Assistance from launch optimization to technical integration to digital marketing.
As an Expedia partner, you can take your project to the next level and build trust with the audience by automating the interaction with the user on your website through an API solution from Expedia.
EPS Rapid — Hotel API From Expedia
With Expedia’s fast and light API, EPS Rapid, you can build a customized hotel booking experience from search to payment and share accommodation options worldwide at the best prices with your audience. EPS Rapid aims to help build an intuitive booking path and provide you with all the data you and your audience need to book a property. Partners get access to accommodations, rates, maps, etc. depending on what experience they wish to create.
Here are some of the advantages for partners when using EPS Rapid:
- Access to over 700,000 accommodations in over 40 property categories, from apartments and houseboats to chain and boutique hotels to help your audience book the best stay.
- The best rates, with half of Expedia properties offering 10% off and highly profitable B2B rates from global hotels, such as Marriott International, etc.
- More than 13 million high-quality property images and 7.5 million room pictures with clear and optimized captions in 40 different languages.
- Holding a rate for as long as 10 minutes when finalizing the booking.
- Automatically getting access to the API’s newest features without having to upgrade. Learn more about the latest version – Rapid 3.
You can also find detailed instructions on how to build a booking path with Expedia’s API on the website.
Flight Search Apis
Expedia’s product features amazing functionality, but if you are searching for more than just a hotel API, take a look at some alternative options that provide flight search.
- First of all, check out this Expedia Mobile API console. It allows you to run flight searches for one-way or round-trip scenarios and get real-time pricing. Product keys last for about 20 minutes before expiring. Mobile API console features a number of APIs: Hotels API, Flights API, Packages API, Trip API, User API, Cars API, and Lx API.
- With the Compare Flight Prices API, you can compare live flight prices from Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, CheapOAir, Skyscanner, and more. It includes fields such as the IATA code for departure and arrival cities, departure and return dates, the number of passengers, type of flights and cabin. You can learn more in the ‘About’ section. Try up to 100 flight searches per month for free. Premium plans start from $19.99 per month.
- Expedia Scraper by Infatica is a proxy-powered API for Expedia. It allows you to get booking rates, flight data, and more. Scraper has access to over 100 locations worldwide to send your web scraping API requests and provides advanced features such as concurrent API requests, CAPTCHA solving, browser support and JS rendering. Enjoy up to 100 free daily requests and unlock premium features starting from $25.00 per month.
- Flight API is a price comparison API that shares rates for flights, hotels, cars and other travel services from over 50 vendors such as Priceline.com, Expedia, Cheaptickets.com, and more. For $49.00 per month, you can access basic features such as tracking any flight around the world at any time, as well as getting nearby airports results with autocomplete API for IATA codes.
Find more flight API solutions at this link.
How to Integrate an API: Best Practices
While APIs allow for automatic and almost immediate data transfer without the need for human intervention, setting up an application programming interface on your website requires some effort.
- With so many APIs out there, it’s important to understand where you start from to find the right solution. Ask yourself the following questions: What kind of website do I have? Can I enable booking or only share flight-related information? What are my budget or resource constraints? What information will my customers expect to find on my website to complete a booking? Choose an API with the corresponding coverage.
- Understand different types of API providers. It can be a global distribution system (GDS), a technical service provider, over-the-air programming (OTA), metasearch engine. The process of API integration will differ for each type of provider. GDP APIs cover hundreds of airlines and also do booking and ticketing yet they may set surcharges and increase the price. Direct partnerships with airlines might require engineering effort but also provide great support and customization for bookings, seats, baggage, etc. A more balanced solution is to combine GDS and direct integrations.
- Once you choose the platform to pull data from, make sure to check its API documentation. Try out its test version. Sometimes, basic features are available for free. This will allow you to see this API in practice and invest money into the tool that suits your business.
- When you have decided on a particular API, get the API key for access and inquire whether the provider can help you with the integration or offer a pre-built API connection. Otherwise, you might need a third-party integrator. Make sure to validate the API responses at your end before the release. One great tool that you can use for integration testing is Postman.
How to Earn on Flight Tickets
APIs are a great way to drive more traffic to your website, but don’t help you monetize your content. To make money with your growing traffic, join airline travel affiliate programs and promote relevant brands to your audience. For example, one such brand that allows you to earn with flight tickets is WayAway.
About Wayaway
WayAway is a flight ticket aggregator that allows users to compare airfare from all major airlines in the United States and around the world and choose flight tickets at the best prices. Developed by Travelpayouts’ experts with over 10 years of experience in the travel niche, WayAway helps travelers organize the trips of their dreams and also earn up to 10% cashback on all their bookings (flights, hotels, car rentals, etc.) with the WayAway Plus membership plan. These funds are sent directly to the users’ PayPal accounts.
How Does the Wayaway Affiliate Program Work?
Affiliates of the WayAway affiliate program can earn up to 50% of the brand’s revenue, as well as $10 for each sale of the WayAway Plus membership plan. Join the program in your personal account at Travelpayouts, place affiliate links and tools on your website or blog, and start receiving commissions for each sale made via your referral link. The program is free to join and there is no pre-approval process.
In contrast to API integration, WayAway doesn’t require technical skills. Just set up the widget parameters in your personal account, copy the code, and publish the widget to your blog to allow users to search for tickets immediately. One more advantage of a search form over APIs is that search forms allow for unlimited searches, while APIs usually have limited requests.
WayAway offers a wide range of affiliate tools: from a flight search form to a schedule widget to a calendar widget and more!
