Merchant Hotels

Room Type Descriptions

<rateDescription>Queen Three</rateDescription>
<roomTypeDescription>Queen Threeg</roomTypeDescription> 
<BedTypes size = "1">
   <BedType id = "23">
      <description>1 Queen Bed</description>
   </BedType>
</BedTypes>

Example:

Room Rate Disclaimer

• Show a room rate disclaimer with room availabilities as it applies to nightly rates.
• This text is not returned in the API, but a free text disclaimer you will add to your site.

  "The room rates listed are for double occupancy per room unless otherwise stated and exclude tax recovery charges and service fees. See FAQs for more details."

Tax Recovery Charges and Service Fees

• Must include this EXACT TEXT on all tax references or where a price breakdown is given (such as room availability, booking form, confirmation results) for Merchant properties:

  "Tax Recovery Charges and Service Fees"

• This exact text is legally required on your site for ALL Merchant inventory when referring to any "taxes and fees" totals.
• DO NOT include this same text on any Agency GDS listings since payment is not charged immediately by us, but paid directly to property by the guest at check in/check out.

Add salesTax and hotelOccupancyTax Values and Display the Sum as a Single Line Item

• When salesTax and hotelOccupancyTax elements are returned, add these values and display as a single "Hotel Occupancy and Sales Tax" line item in the price breakdown.
• Display this item when values are returned in the final confirmation result. This value is already included in the Tax Recovery Charges and Service Fees and is simply a breakout of the surcharge.
• This is specifically required for properties in New York state, as it represents local tax charges.  Values for these items may be returned on other choice locations if mandated by those local tax laws.

<surcharges size="3">     
<Surcharge amount="65.98" type="TaxAndServiceFee"/>    
<Surcharge amount="15.28" type="SalesTax"/>    
<Surcharge amount="36.38" type="HotelOccupancyTax"/>    
</surcharges>

Example display for the above Surcharges with salesTax and hotelOccupancyTax displayed as a single line item:

Breakdown of Charges

A breakdown of charges showing the taxes and fees returned is required in all cases with NO EXCEPTIONS allowed.

Room and Rate/Night: Queen Three 

10 Nov 10 $159.00   
11 Nov 11 $119.00
12 Nov 12 $119.00 
13 Nov 13 $119.00 
  (excluding tax recovery charges and service fees)   
  
  Extra person fees: $52.00  

Total Tax Recovery Charges and Service Fees: $88.18 

Total Charges at time of booking : $656.18 (USD) 
  (includes tax recovery charges and service fees) 

Display the Total Chargeable Price

• Display the total price of the reservation for the rooms selected, which includes all "Tax Recovery Charges and Service Fees," on the booking page and the confirmation page.
• You cannot send any other value than the one returned in the room availability response without causing issues or errors in booking.
• Do not calculate your own totals. Use those returned.
• The value in the total returned is the price that will be charged in full at booking time as a PREPAID reservation.

Cancellation Policies

• Cancellation policies are required from the room response data on the booking form for the room selected at minimum. Best Practice is to include the cancellation policy for each room returned.
  • DO NOT hard code policy data, as this will be different for each property, room AND supplier.
  • This is the cancellation policy which will be applicable to reservation for the dates selected.
  • Inaccurate policy information results in customer disputes and charges to your account.
• Each room returned in the room availability response has its own policy, and each may be different depending on the room type.
• The cancellation policy for the selected room should be displayed or visible through a pop up link in each of these places at a minimum:
  • Booking form 
    
  • Final confirmation page

Nonrefundable Reservations

• Check the NONREFUNDABLE element returned in the data response.
• NONREFUNDABLE reservations will usually be listed in the cancellation policy as well.
• They can also be listed in the room descriptions in some cases.
  • Check for these occurrences by performing a sample search for New Orleans, LA, US during Feb 1 to 10 or other dates during the Mardi Gras period. (You may use any heavily booked location and event as a test, Mardi Gras is just an example.)
  • Compare the cancellation data on your site to the data returned on the same hotel on travelnow.com.
  • Ensure that any NONREFUNDABLE text is clear and visible to the user.
• These reservations are not refunded by the property under any circumstances.
• Use caution in test booking your site to ensure you do not place a nonrefundable booking by choosing properties and rooms wisely. Review the section on Test Booking Procedures to ensure nonrefundable bookings are not placed on live tests.

General Policies from the hotel info results

• These policies should be displayed when returned in the hotel info results when also showing Merchant availabilty and pricing results.   The text from this element should be included on the booking form with the cancellation policy for Merchant inventory.
•  It does not apply to any Agency availabilty results and should therefore be omitted in those cases.  If displaying hotel information without any availability and pricing results, omit this statement or state that it will apply to prepaid bookings only.
• Example data result:

  <hotelPolicy>You must present a photo ID when checking in. Your credit card is charged at the time you book. Bed type and smoking preferences are not guaranteed.Your reservation is prepaid and is guaranteed for late arrival. The total charge includes all room charges and taxes, as well as fees for access and booking. Any incidental charges such as parking, phone calls, and room service will be handled directly between you and the property.</hotelPolicy>

• Include this disclaimer on all Merchant availabilities along with other policies:

  By proceeding with this reservation, you agree to all terms and conditions, which include the Cancellation Policy and all terms and conditions contained in the User Agreement. You agree to pay the cost of your reservation. If you do not pay this debt and it is collected through the use of a collection agency, an attorney, or through other legal proceedings, you agree to pay all reasonable costs or fees, including attorney fees and court costs, incurred in connection with such collection effort.

Prepaid Charges

• Display that the credit card WILL BE CHARGED IMMEDIATELY FOR THE FULL AMOUNT of the reservation on the booking page.
• Display that the PAYMENT IN FULL was made for the full amount of the reservation on the final confirmation page.

Check-In Instructions

• MUST display the checkin instructions if returned in the room availability and/or reservation results.
• This is returned on some rare properties where the user needs to know special information BEFORE THEY ARRIVE regarding how to get checked into the property if 24 hour check in is NOT available
• In cases where the user does not receive this info and is unable to check into the property, customer disputes and chargebacks will result on the affiliate account.

<checkInInstructions>Extra-person charges may apply and vary depending on hotel policy. <br />Guests must show current government-issued proof of identity at the time of check-in. <br />Photo identification and credit card or cash deposit are required at check-in for incidental charges. <br />Special requests are subject to availability upon check-in and may incur additional charges. Special requests cannot be guaranteed.</checkInInstructions> 

Proper Use and Display Regarding Credit Card Regulations

There are special rules merchants are required to follow regarding how users are given a choice of cards to select, which part of the user's card number can be displayed, and how the credit card information can be submitted or verified.

Review these details carefully to insure your site follows all PCI regulations. Fines are imposed by credit card companies to offending sites that can run into tens of thousands of dollars. When using the API to collect and send user credit card information, all rules must be followed exactly as outlined to prevent your site from incurring fines from these payment processors.

1. Review Brand Parity requirements.
2. More about Credit Card Requirements.

Validating Check Boxes for All Cancellation Policies with Links to Product Terms and Conditions of Sale

• You are required to use VALIDATING check boxes for the user's agreement to all terms and conditions, and cancel policies that currently appear on the booking forms for each product on travelnow.com.
• You are required to link to our Terms and Conditions as it applies to our product sales.
• All white label customizations will carry over to this page when using your own CID.
• You may mask the URL with a CNAME if desired.
• Your customer must be aware of and intentionally agree to all policies.

  “I agree to the following cancellation policy. (Display the cancellation policy from the user selection.) By continuing with your reservation you agree to the terms and conditions, including the User Agreement” (Link to http://travel.ian.com/index.jsp?pageName=userAgreement&locale=en_US&cid=xxx )

Partners are not allowed to copy content from this page as the proprietary information is updated regularly by the legal team without notice.

This checkpoint is required of all partners without exception and is mandated by your agreement of the Affiliate Contract when signing up and becoming an EAN sales partner.

Disclaimer for Any Property Photos

• This disclaimer for property photos must be present since the individual properties are responsible for the images that are entered into the system. A good place to include this is in your hotel info pages:

  “Note: It is the responsibility of the hotel chain and/or the individual property to ensure the accuracy of the photos displayed. ‘ Yourwebsite.com’ is not responsible for any inaccuracies in the photos.”

SSL Encryption of User Sensitive Data

• You are REQUIRED to use SSL encryption on all booking forms, booking confirmation pages, itinerary forms, itinerary response pages, cancel forms and cancel pages.
• If you do not collect and submit data for these pages using https, your requests will fail.

Therefore if booking forms, confirmation pages, itinerary forms and response pages, or cancel forms and response pages are not residing on a url that shows HTTPS in the browser's address bar, your site will fail this checkpoint.

If you do not have your own SSL certificate, then you should be passing the user to your affiliate template page for filling in any of these forms where the process will be handled and completed on your white label template pages.

Prevent Duplicate Bookings

ALL API affiliates must also ensure they include appropriate logic or mechanisms in their applications that prevent users from submitting duplicate booking requests when a duplicate booking is not desired. See the appropriate documentation page for a complete overview of implementing this requirement.

Implement any of the below suggestions as they pertain to your booking pages:

• Add text to your booking pages indicating that the user may be charged each time they click the booking button should such actions lead to duplicate bookings.
  • Duplicate bookings for GDS Agency hotel properties create customer service issues and inventory problems with these hotel suppliers.
  • Note that although GDS properties are not prepaid, if a user cancels the reservation inside the cancel policy, charges still incur for holding those additional rooms.
• Use special logic to prevent the user from submitting duplicate bookings by including session IDs or other such API mechanisms.
  • For hotels, refer to the Reservation Request section and review logic for use with affiliateConfirmationId or affiliateCustomerId. Ensure that use of these elements does not prevent a user from resubmitting a booking if an error is received.
• Use Javascript validation that allows the user to only click the submit button once. If a booking must be submitted a second time (after receiving an error), refresh the room results and have the user select again with new data.

These items will assist you with impatient users who continue to click the booking button while waiting for their booking confirmation.

• In the event a user continues to click the button, they will only see a single confirmation result once they finally allow the response to parse to the page.
• Any previous results have been overridden by the new responses and will not be seen.
• Users may only know they have placed duplicate bookings if they become suspicious of multiple confirmation emails or observe multiple charges to their card.
• Other users may only know they have booked multiple rooms once they arrive at the hotel.
  • Canceling these reserved rooms at that time results in cancellation charges with the property for holding those rooms.

Customer disputes are charged to the affiliate in cases where hotel charges are not refunded.

Cancel multiple-room bookings individually

Test your process and ensure clear messaging to the user that each room confirmation number in the itinerary must be cancelled individually.

Only one room can be cancelled per request, therefore on a multi-room reservation, a cancellation request must be submitted for EACH room designated by the confirmationNumber that is to be cancelled. 

An entire itinerary with multiple rooms/confirmation numbers cannot be cancelled in a single request.

Failure to ensure that each room confirmation number is cancelled individually will potentially end up with rooms that will NOT be refunded by the hotel due to "customer no show" when additional rooms in the itinerary are not cancelled.

Charges incurred by customer dispute are charged back to your affiliate account.

Updated CID and API Key

Once your site is approved and your apiKey and CID are set for production access, update all requests to use your own account information. The apiKey and CID in your request for a site review is what is used to set access. These two values are set together and flagged for the authentication process you chose in your application form: IP or Digital Signature. If using IP authentication, you must ensure your IP addresses are registered in your developer account.

Include disclaimer that Venere and all other Agency listings can be booked ONLINE ONLY when including these results with Merchant availabilities

Venere and all other Agency properties (supplierType=V, S, or W) can be booked ONLINE ONLY, therefore a disclaimer must be made on these listings that the property cannot be booked by phone when dialing the call centers.

• If a user contacts the call center and asks to book one of these availabilities, they will be instructed to go back to the website to reserve online.

By informing users of the proper way to make these bookings, less call center sales will be lost and your own gross profit will increase.

Proper messaging and input of child ages

• Number of children (1-3 per room) 
• Used by Merchant properties and required if children occupy the room.  Child ages are sent with GDS requests, but a property not configured to utilize more than 2 persons per room may return an error as a limitation of that downstream system.
• Omit when numberOfChildren is not supplied by the user or is 0.

Each hotel configures what age range they classify as a child.

Generally age 17 or less is considered the child age range, but can vary by property. Submitting bookings with assumed ages or omitting ages altogether will create customer service issues and disputes.

FAQs

• FAQs avert customer care issues.
• Use of information from the travel.ian.com FAQ pages will inform your visitors of specific terms related to their booking selections. Use the links below or transfer any relative text to your own customer service pages:
  • http://travel.ian.com/index.jsp?pageName=faq&cid=XXX
  • http://travel.ian.com/index.jsp?pageName=hotelFaq&cid=XXX
  • http://travel.ian.com/index.jsp?&pageName=airFaq&cid=XXX
  • http://travel.ian.com/index.jsp?&pageName=carFaq&cid=XXX

Customer Support Center

Employ this dedicated, standalone customer support website for support of EAN hotel bookings. It offers fast, 24x7 global access to a knowledge base of useful help articles that are continuously updated. Use as a pop up, stand-alone page, or iFrame widget to provide customer access to common support and help information. Save a support phone call or email by helping customers help themselves!

Support Center URL: http://findanswers.custhelp.com

More information: http://developer.ean.com/docs/hotels/assets/customer_support/