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Getting started with TourCMS API, part two (for Operators)
Make sure you have read part one.
Connecting to TourCMS to sell tours & activities loaded by others? Read part two for Marketplace Agents instead.
Common use-cases
If you are using TourCMS API to power the descriptions on your website you will likely use Search Tours to display listing pages, Show Tour for detail pages, Dates & Deals for an availability calendar. Alternatively there is a TourCMS WordPress Plugin which can be used to provide similar functionality.
If you are using TourCMS API to take bookings please see the endpoints in our booking creation documentation. Alternatively there is a hosted booking solution which can be easily added to your website in a few moments.
If you are using TourCMS as a channel manager and would like to send TourCMS-generated bookings to your internal reservation system we have endpoints you can use to manage your dates & prices, and webhooks that can allow TourCMS to check your subsystem for live availability and notify of new bookings or cancellations. Please contact us to discussion options and request a copy of our subsystem integration guide.
Making products available to the API
The following criteria must be met before a Tour will be available via the API:
- Account settings
- You must upgrade to a paid TourCMS account if you haven't done so already
- You must configure at least one of your Channels for the TourCMS Marketplace. To do this log in to TourCMS, head to TourCMS Marketplace, click Configure and fill in the required details
- You must switch on the API. To do this head to Configuration & setup > API, tick Enable then Save changes
- Individual product settings
- The Tour must be set to Distributed (in the Setup page for the Tour, under the General tab)
- The Tour must have all the basic Marketplace fields completed. To see which information you still need to fill in head to Tours > Descriptions & Images for the tour and look on the Incomplete data tab
Additionally some API calls will - by default - only return products that have availability loaded.
The TourCMS Marketplace page inside TourCMS will be useful as you progress loading your products, it shows which of your products are Fully setup (so should show up in API calls), which Could be made better (perhaps have overly short descriptions or fairly small images) and which have Incomplete data.
Product Page URLs
To ensure quality TourCMS periodically checks each Tour Product Page URL and if the page cannot be found the item will be hidden from the API until the URL is updated or the page is back online. If Tours are switched on for the Marketplace and have all the required data completed but are not appearing in API searches or on widgets it could be that your Product Page URLs have been set incorrectly, TourCMS has detected a problem and removed them from the API until the problem is fixed.
If this is the case when you head to TourCMS Marketplace you will see the Tours listed under the "Incomplete data" column, we will also send occasional emails to channel owners notifying them of the problem.
In some cases this may cause a Catch-22 situation, whereby you are developing a new Operator website using the XML API or WordPress plugin, in this case you should set a temporary product page URL that points to a holding / home page on your website and then update once the correct pages exist.
Updating Product Page URLs programatically
The Update Tour method can be used to fix product Page URLs, there are a couple of different ways to approach this:
- If you are importing product data into your own database - You may want to check the tour_url returned in the XML, if it is not correct you could update TourCMS with the correct URL by calling Update Tour
- If you are using the API directly - You may want to set up job that runs once a day or so to check for any Tours that are returning errors. To search for Tours that have problem URLs just make a call to Search Tours passing in 404_tour_url=error, then for each of those just update TourCMS with the correct URL by calling Update Tour
Questions?
Please do contact us.