PilotFish Interface Exchange (PIE)

Introduction

OpenTravel provides standard for the travel and leisure industry. It’s specification is used by suppliers, resellers, global distributors and integrators worldwide to meet customer and trading partner demands by easily XML-enabling web services and applications.

The OpenTravel Specification supports the following travel industry segments:

• Air
• Car Rental
• Cruise
• Customer Profiles
• Day Tours & Activities
• Dynamic Packages (air, car, hotel, extras)
• Ground Transportation
• Hotel & Hostel
• Loyalty Programs
• Packaged Tours
• Rail

You can read more about the OpenTravel at http://www.opentravel.org/.

Interface Definition

If you are new to OpenTravel standart in this sample you can find several OpenTravel request examples for cruise data exchange and how to use it with eiConsole. Interface is used to show how you can seamlessly connect your own system to any OTA-comliant systems for data exchange.

Interface contains four OpenTravel transaction templates. They are interconnected and emulate requests to the OpenTravel compliant service. You can see the full list of the OpenTravel standard requests and the entire OTA model in the OpenTravel Model Viewer. This particular interface contains the following requests/response messages:

• OTA_CruiseInfoRQ - Used to request miscellaneous structured cruise information (e.g., cruise ship characteristics, embark/debark time for cruise, cruise policy, cruise line contact).
• OTA_CruiseInfoRS - Used to provide miscellaneous structured cruise information (e.g. cruise ship characteristics, embark/debark time for cruise, cruise policy, cruise line contact etc.
• OTA_CruiseBookRQ - The book request message requests booking creation on the cruise line system for a given sailing with a specific mode of transportation/ gateway city pair and currency and for a selected fare/category pair and a cabin number. It also integrates this booking into a GDS's PNR based on the cruise line reply. Optional request information can include: Guest city and Inclusive package.
• OTA_CruiseBookRS - The book response message contains booking information for a given sailing with a specific mode of transportation/gateway city pair and currency and for a selected fare/category pair. This message contains similar information to a standard airline CRS or GDS sailing availability response message.
• OTA_CruiseCancellationPricingRQ - The cancellation pricing request message is used to price the cancellation penalities if a reservation were to be cancelled.
• OTA_CruiseCancellationPricingRS - The cruise cancellation pricing message returns the computed cancellation penalities.
• OTA_CruiseShorexAvailRQ - The shorex availability request message requests shore excursions for a given sailing and currency.
• OTA_CruiseShorexAvailRS - The shorex availability response message contains shore excursion packages that are available for the given sailing/ports.

You can find all of the necessary data files (input files, sample request messages, XML Schemas) in the data folder of the interface One of the routes in this interface (OTA_SERVICE_EMULATOR) is responsible for emulating the OTA cruise service. It basically listens to all of the requests from other routes and sends them appropriate responses.

Environment Settings

This interface depends on a set of environment settings that need to be defined before actual using/testing. To set the environment settings, go to the main menu of the XCS eiConsole and select Route -> Environment Properties... menu item. Below you can see the list of the settings that need to be defined:

• Initial_XML_File - the name of the XML file to pick up in the inbound directory.
• dir.data - the data directory path.
• dir.inbound - the inbound directory where the interface will look for input files.
• dir.outbound - the output directory of the interface.

Tutorial

In the attachments to this interface (on the right-hand side panel) you can download short manual to this interface. It describes how this product was created and contains a set of screenshots that would let to to understand the internal processes and general level of flexibility of the system.

Release Details

This is the initial release of the Expedia Hotels Integration Interface Template.