Ask HN: Hotel API's

Which affiliate programs have you applied to?

Have you tried http://hotelscombined.com or http://kayak.com?

Both have great databases for hotel content, but I'm not sure of what restrictions they have for their API.

P.S. I also know Wego (http://wego.com) have an API in the works, if you can get in touch with them through their contact form they can probably work something out (Disclaimer: I used to work at wego.com)

Email peter.armstrong@buy.at or Rebecca.riches@buy.at. I found their details on this page:

http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/travel-leisure/151557-exp...

These companies want API users, there is no reason why they aren't letting you access the data unless you screwed something up previously

(edit: sorry no idea what happen there, went to edit my comment and it deleted. I was going to add that you might want to mock up your app with test data so that they can get an idea of what you are doing, as opposed to showing them an empty site. Scrape some hotel details for a single city with fake booking info and show that to them.

These companies have no problem with affiliate spammers dumping their entire DBs onto hundreds of crappy websites, so they shouldn't have a problem with you - just mock something up for them to see so that they know you are real )

If I remember correctly, it was quite easy to get access to booking.com and here's the documentation for their webservice http://xml.booking.com/

You'd be better off contacting them first, before clicking on the join button. These affiliate programmes expect to see an established service - allowing them to decide if the service is appropriate for their brand and product - after all, it's marketing people who handle this sort of stuff.

Not sure if you are aware of this, but the hotel and hostel business is dominated by a small number of B2B providers who you have probably never heard of. Ironically, I can't remember their names off-hand, but if you are serious, then consider approaching them in the long term.

Just use sample data to make the site look complete for now. You'll gain 2 benefits:

1. It will reduce the chance of rejection for "incomplete site"

and more importantly:

2. It will allow you to start customer development and usability testing, which might be a better use of time right now anyway (before hours are invested coding and integrating).

I doubt your toughest challenge will be integrating an API. Your toughest challenge will likely be getting users to love the results.

Best of luck! It's great to see some of the recent innovation in the travel tech space.

I have access to most of these API's, if you want to use my details to fill your site while you get accepted, ping me an email dominichodgson@gmail.com :)

Would anything on the OTA( http://www.opentravel.org/) site be useful?

It's been some years since I wrote hotel reservation system code, and I don't know if the OTA stuff is (or was) meant to be just intra-industry, or a means to make it easier for TA's, affiliates, etc. to do business.

I think the later, but I attended an OTA meeting in D.C. once and the amount of bureaucracy and attention to petty stupid detail was astounding, so anything is possible.

Take a loot at : http://icarusone.com/index/icarus

I integrated the Air search using the Kayak API. Currently working on the Hotel API provided by them. They provide ample amount of information, check them out.

I've built a couple of sites using Laterooms and they are very approachable. Each time I've spoken on the phone first & gone through things. One site was barely a holding page at this stage. You might have more luck this way.

Their API is one of the good ones too - lots of nice stuff available.

Does anyone know what the requirements may be to connect with the hotel chains directly and bypass all these sites?