Reservation API Upgrade in Child Pricing

Child fees & legal compliance

To comply with European consumer law, we require to upgrade our systems to display extra fees applied for children configured by the partner in the total price. The law aims to provide more clarity to guests by requiring all mandatory costs and charges to be shown in the total price.

For properties this change is providing more flexibility in configuring inventory & rates for families, resulting in more competitive rates.

 

Reservations API change

As this roll out affects the total price displayed on the booking process for guests, changes on the reservation API are rolled out to ensure that total price & guest count reflect any potential child fees.

This change is rolled out in the form of the feature ‘guest_count_with_children’. It will ...

1. Activate any configured child pricing rules on frontend,
2. Ensure that any extra fees are included in the ‘total price’ as well as ‘booked child occupancy’ is added to the ‘total guest count’.

Only if the feature is adopted, child pricing rules will be activated and properly displayed next to the total price throughout the booking process on the frontend.

No changes to the format or other values in the XML file will be made. Please note that this feature won’t enable the breakdown by adults & children which is a known limitation and source of friction. This feature will be released at a later stage.

 

Potential Impact

Research during the test phase showed that checks on the total guest count field could potentially result in fallbacks. If this is the case please get in touch with your PBM or the Support team.

Release & Ask

The feature will be made available by August 29th  via the provider portal. Once available please adopt the new feature to make sure that your accommodation provider complies with the new legal compliance per Sep 24, 2019.

 

Examples of changed behaviors

Current version frontend without feature

(Extra fees are displayed in fine print of the hotel page.)

New version frontend with feature

(Extra fees are included in the total price.)

 

Current version Booking.com extranet without feature

 

New version Booking.com extranet with feature

 

Current version OTA message without feature

New version OTA message with feature

Current version BXML message without feature

New version BXML message with feature