Amadeus API Integration - Etraviax

Amadeus GDS is a global distribution system established in 1987 by the collaborative effort of four major airlines; Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, and SAS. This system was created as an alternative to the American Sabre GDS and currently serves travel businesses in 190 countries worldwide. It has a market share of over 40%, making it one of the world's most widely used global distribution systems.

The Amadeus GDS provides various services to travel businesses, such as booking flights, hotels, car rental booking software, Cruise Booking Engine and other travel services. It also offers tools to manage inventory and customer data, allowing travel businesses to gain insights into customer behaviours and preferences. Additionally, Amadeus API Integration provides a secure platform for sharing data between travel businesses, allowing for more efficient operations. Online travel agencies (OTAs), travel management companies (TMCs), host travel agencies, air consolidators, and other digital travel sellers are among Amadeus' clients.

They can use a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to search, compare, and book inventory.

• APIs for flight booking provide access to deals from over 400 airlines, including 130 low-cost carriers, ancillary services from 150 airlines, and fare families from over 100 airlines.
• APIs for booking hotels that connect to over a million properties from 150,000 providers
• APIs for tours and activities containing information from 101 tour operators
• APIs for car rentals that connect to 75 mobility providers in over 1800 cities worldwide, rail booking APIs with content from 90 different rail companies
• APIs for booking and shopping for travel insurance from 22 insurance companies; and other travel APIs

Watch our video to learn more about APIs and why they are essential. We will discuss both self-service and enterprise APIs and show you how to use them in your project. Self-Service APIs: a simple way to launch a small travel project

For data exchange, the Amadeus Self-Service APIs use the modern REST architectural style and the JSON format. They were made

relatively recently as an easy and cheap way for businesses without travel agency certifications to use GDS technologies and quickly start travel startups.

Amadeus' REST APIs are constantly expanding, and they can now power flight, hotel, and tour booking engines and help you create apps for planning and purchasing trips. Watch our video to learn more about how booking engines work.

Content and Functionality

Etraviax Flight Booking software enables you to automate the flight booking process, incorporate seat selection, find the cheapest flight destinations from a given city to inspire travellers, and much more. You can also integrate advanced features such as airport autocomplete search, insights into local travel habits (most booked destinations or busiest travelling period), or flight price analysis based on Amadeus's historical data.

The Hotel Booking Software enables users to search for hotels and book them directly from your website. It covers the entire booking process, from searching for hotels, and browsing through listings and ratings, to making a reservation and completing payment.

It also makes your search results more useful by adding hotel ratings, so users can easily filter and compare hotels. Additionally, the Hotel Booking API allows for the autocompletion of searches, making it easier for users to find the hotel they're looking for quickly and efficiently.

APIs for destination content return information about the best attractions, tours, and activities in a given location. You can also obtain popularity scores for a specific latitude and longitude. The four parameters for evaluating destinations are sightseeing, restaurants, nightlife, and shopping.

Airline Reservation System APIs use artificial intelligence to guess whether a user travels for business or pleasure and make personalized suggestions based on past searches and bookings.

How to Create Integrations Using Self-Service APIs

To begin working with Self-Service APIs, create an account and, once confirmed, generate an access token that will identify you as an authorized developer.

GDS offers a test environment, code examples, and SDKs to simplify API integration. Check the official GitHub repo for libraries to add APIs to Ruby, Python, Java, Node.js, .NET, Kotlin (Android dev), and Swift (iOS dev).

Amadeus grants a fixed number of free API calls each month, varying from 200 to 10,000 depending on the API, for testing and adjusting integrations with limited data. Hire Travel Developers who can make calls at a rate of 1 every 100 milliseconds."The best thing about some Self-Service APIs is that, under the hood, they make several transactions to respond to a single request.

At Etraviax Technologies, we worked with Amadeus APIs on numerous travel projects. "Amadeus hides this complexity from developers, saving them time and making their work much easier." To complete the booking, for example, you only need to integrate one endpoint rather than three or four."

Etraviax an Amadeus software development company provides a straightforward booking process for flights and hotels with three steps. Users can view all available flights and hotels during the search stage based on their query. After they select the desired options, they can view the prices and decide whether they want to book the flight or hotel. Once they have chosen their choice, they can easily book a flight or hotel.

Price confirms the availability and cost of the flight and the hotel prices and terms. Booking will make the flight order and hotel reservation.

A developer works with the same object (request) within this flow, updating it with new information at each step. "You simply receive the response from the first API, add some information, and send it to the next endpoint." Amadeus API simplifies development because you don't have to create each request from scratch."

How to Take an App to Production

When your Flight Booking App is ready to go live, you can move it to the production environment, where your project can access accurate data and unlimited calls.

This transition consists of two steps:

Request a production key. You'll need to fill out a form with your personal and billing information, choose a preferred payment method, and sign the Terms of Service agreement using DocuSign.

Validation and unique environment creation can take up to 72 hours for the Amadeus team to validate your first app and create a unique environment. This process will only take a few hours for all the following apps. If everything goes as planned, Amadeus will notify you that you have been granted production access.

Except for the Flight Create Orders API, which completes the air booking flow, this flow is standard for all Self-Service products. To use it in production, you must accept Amadeus's terms and conditions, follow local regulations, and ensure that the API is available in your region. Most importantly, you must agree with an airline consolidator.

What does an airline consolidator have to do with a flight booking app?

Flight tickets cannot be issued without accreditation from the Airline Reporting Corporation (ARC) in the United States or the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in the rest of the world. Learn more about the certification process in our articles on ARC Accreditation Options and How to Get IATA Accreditation.

To summarize, small travel agencies and newcomers typically need more resources to be licensed by IATA or ARC. The typical solution to this problem is to work out a deal with a host agency or airline consolidator to do the ticketing in exchange for a commission. Amadeus assists those who are unsure where to begin in locating an intermediary. If you already have an IATA/ARC-accredited partner, it must be approved by the GDS.

Where to get API Integration Assitance 

Amadeus keeps clear and detailed API documentation and a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page that constantly adds new questions.

At the same time, the GDS does not offer phone or live chat support for the Self-Service API catalog. Please get in touch with their Developer Relations team via the contact form if you require assistance. However, they do not guarantee a prompt response.

You can also seek help from the Amadeus for Developers community on Discord and StackOverflow, which currently has over 300 technical questions about Amadeus API integrations (nearly half of them remain unanswered, though). Another option is to post your questions on our travel technology forum, Tech talks.

Pricing conditions

With the Self-Service subscription, you can create your app for free. When you go live, you keep the same number of free calls you had in the test environment. If this limit is exceeded, the system will automatically charge a fee for each transaction (which varies depending on the API and ranges from 0.0008 to 0.025 euro or $0.00078 to 0.024).

Pay-as-you-go works well for businesses with a small number of clients. However, as your company expands and attracts more visitors, the Self-Service pricing system becomes less advantageous. Aside from that, you can enhance your app with features that are not available through REST APIs. These factors encourage businesses to consider enterprise APIs.

Enterprise APIs: a full-fledged service for large travel companies

Etraviax Technologies began working with Amadeus when the democratic Self-Service catalog did not yet exist. Only large travel companies certified by ARC or IATA could access GDS content via rather old SOAP APIs designed in 1998.

Today, Amadeus is gradually transitioning from SOAP to REST, but this process still needs to be completed. To access the lion's share of features, you must still use SOAP and be large enough to afford the Enterprise subscription. In addition to having more features, enterprise clients get customized pricing, technical support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and a problem-solving manager.

The Enterprise API Catalog: Content and Functionality

The Amadeus Enterprise API catalog contains approximately 200 SOAP and REST APIs, which small agencies can integrate through the Self-Service offering. The following are critical capabilities provided by this subscription that are not available via Self-Service.

Ticketing services at the time of booking. As previously stated, the Self-Service tier caters to businesses that do not have travel accreditations. They are not authorized to sell airline tickets and must work with a consolidator. In turn, enterprise clients have the necessary credentials to issue and manage e-tickets, and Amadeus provides them with technical means to automate all aspects of this process.

Travel Companies can manage reservations through REST and SOAP APIs. These APIs allow you to book flights and other services and search, retrieve, display, and modify Personal Name Records (PNRs). Watch our video to learn more about PNRs.

How to Create Integrations with Enterprise APIs.

Unlike the Self-Service subscription, which allows you to access GDS APIs almost instantly and without any preconditions, the Enterprise level requires you to meet specific standards (such as being IATA/ARC certified). It involves lengthy negotiations that can last weeks or even months. For more information, please get in touch with Amadeus via their contact form.

After signing a contract, you can build and test your integrations against test data in the Enterprise APIs sandbox. You can use developer-friendly REST APIs as long as they cover the functionality you want to implement. Then switch to SOAP — Amadeus supports REST and SOAP product combinations.

The Web Service Description Language is typically used to explain the technical details of SOAP APIs to a client app. You can generate implementation code from WSDL files and, in this way, partially automate the integration process.

Nonetheless, SOAP APIs are difficult to work with because they are based on a verbose XML message format rather than JSON, less adaptable than REST not orchestrated, which means you usually have to make several requests to complete a single operation; and poorly described API documentation for the Amadeus SOAP catalog leaves a lot to be desired.

"When building SOAP-based workflows, you need to create several requests within one session," says Ivan Mosiev, who has worked with the Amadeus SOAP catalog. "This increases the likelihood of failure because something can go wrong between requests, such as an error on our or Amadeus' end or a network outage." As a result, you must write many more lines of code to account for all non-standard situations that may arise during the session."

Interactions with SOAP APIs will be less painful if you hire a development team with experience with Amadeus Enterprise integrations. This will save you the trouble of conducting time-consuming research and learning from common mistakes.

How to Take an App to Production

Before going live, your app must be certified by Amadeus. The GDS evaluates how well your technology integrates with their Enterprise APIs and thus protects them from incorrect usage. Even those who have purchased a ready-made solution must undergo the certification process. Unlike the Self-Service subscription, it takes weeks rather than days.

For developers, certification entails the following steps:

• Request multiple scenarios, such as a one-way trip for one, a round trip for one or two adults, and a family with a child and infant for Flight API.
• Sign each call with your unique ID
• Send the request and response log to Amadeus 

Consider comments, correct errors, and send another log. Please wait once more.

Regarding flight api integration, most complaints are regarding the time between booking and ticketing. However, with an authorized consolidator in the Self-Service subscription, this wait time is significantly reduced (to up to three days, as per Amadeus' website.)The good news for enterprise clients interested in flight booking is that once you've implemented the main workflow from search to ticketing, adding other features — such as seat maps — will be relatively simple.

When you finally get certified after multiple iterations, Amadeus moves the integrations to the production environment and allows them to work with accurate data.

The GDS configures your account based on your target region," explains Andrii Chebotarov, Managing Director of Travel and Transportation Competency Consulting at Etraviax Technologies. "Search requests for this region will return the most recent prices and availability information, whereas search results for other territories may be lower quality."

Where can I get assistance?

The enterprise subscription includes a service-level agreement or contract between you and Amadeus that specifies the level of technical support you can expect.

In most cases, the GDS will assign you a dedicated account manager and support team to answer your questions, assist you with configurations, change your account settings, and so on. In other words, you can contact Amadeus's experts via email if something goes wrong during development or production.

Pricing conditions

Enterprise clients pay a monthly fee for system access and services, which includes a free request quota. If the percentage is surpassed, extra charges apply. Amadeus offers customized pricing based on individual needs.

The pricing terms can be determined by your look-to-book ratio, which shows how many site visitors purchase from you. If your customers only browse offerings and do not book anything, developers can change the conditions for calling APIs to be less advantageous.