How to request test data for Blocked by Minimum Length of Stay opportunities?

We want to help you test if the date_level_inventory_opportunities feature is working for you. And more specifically, we want to test if your workflow is optimised for handling Blocked by Minimum Length of Stay (BBMLOS) opportunities. 

BBMLOS opportunities are read-only, provider-type opportunities. This makes it difficult for us to support end-to-end testing because they can only be implemented on your platform. 

However, you can request simulated opportunities to help validate your implementation. You can then use this testing data to reliably develop this feature for your platform and make sure your properties are ready to act on these opportunities whenever they’re eligible.

How to start accessing test data

BBMLOS opportunities are generated when your property has dates on which the value of the minimum length of stay restrictions applied is more than the consecutive number of available days.

In this example, the MLOS restrictions applied on the 5th and 6th of the month require a stay of three nights, but the room is only available for two nights.

You can request these opportunities for your test hotels if you meet the following criteria:

1. You have successfully implemented the Opportunities API (with less than 10 live properties)
2. You have enabled the date_level_inventory_opportunities feature from the provider portal
3. You have at least one test hotel properly set-up in our system (with rooms, rate-plans and inventory properly mapped)

For a bookable room in this test hotel, you need to simulate the situation depicted above. One simple way to do this is to close the availability for two consecutive sets of weekend days (both Saturdays & Sundays) within the next 50 days, and set MLOS >=6 for all the weekdays in between for all active rates (or close all rates except one). This situation will simulate a ‘dummy’ BBMLOS opportunity for each of the weekdays between the closed weekend days.

Note: Outside the testing scenario, these opportunities are generated automatically whenever our system detects a period (typically between existing reservations) where an otherwise bookable room (with active rates, prices and availability) cannot be accessed only due to the MLOS restrictions applied. Properties do not need to close rooms or rates in order to become eligible, and there are no predetermined blocked dates. As this eligibility is highly dynamic, we recommend checking for these opportunities for your properties once every three hours or more. Please do not use live data for testing purposes.

What can you do with this data?

You can use this data to validate your implementation of the core user journey for this opportunity (Fetch opportunity > display to property > lead to restrictions management page > reduce restriction for specified room-date combinations).

Necessary steps:

1. Fetch all opportunities for test hotel(s) that meet requirements 3 & 4 by using /opportunity-api/properties/{property_id}/opportunities (pass test hotel_id as {property_id})
2. Parse the response for opportunity_id = blocked_by_minimum_length_of_stay
3. Parse the implementation data within these for all stay_ids
4. Split stay_ids to retrieve room_ids and stay_dates
5. Test the implementation flow of any eligible opportunities

Optional steps:

• If needed, reset MLOS to a suitable value for the same stay-dates to make these opportunities available again for further testing.
• Test for the following scenarios: Implementing for a single room on a single date for a single rate; implementing for a room-date for multiple rates, implementing for multiple rooms on a single date; handling zero eligible opportunities; and implementing for multiple rooms on multiple dates.

What next?

That’s it! Once you have successfully validated your implementation with the testing data, you’re ready to roll this out to your live (non-test) properties.