6x Key Insights From Our Connectivity Engineers

Our Connectivity Engineering Team and Project Managers recently hosted a webinar for the developers that build APIs from our Connectivity Partners to GetYourGuide.

Here’s what we learned about how you can improve your own integration and maximize our mutual suppliers performance with GetYourGuide:

You only need to push availability when the update is critical

To keep availability in sync, partners can push an experience supplier’s availability when a critical change occurs in the number of vacancies - such as when a product sells out. Since we launched this endpoint, for some partners, a majority of pushes have not been critical. This consumes compute power unnecessarily, and impacts our ability to keep availability in sync across our 60000+ products.

The criteria for critical pushes can be found here.

Pricing Over API is coming this summer

Excitingly, we’ll start to consume a supplier’s pricing information over API. This will offer supplier’s more flexibility to adjust their pricing to win more bookings without the manual work.

At first, it will only be valid for ‘Individual’ product configurations and not ‘Group’ product configurations. It’s expected that we’ll go live in July 2022 with this feature, and the code is available to implement now in the API documentation. 

Errors are in the eyes of the customer

One question we received during the Q&A was about why we perceive ‘No Availability’ of a product to be an error. A technical error hasn’t occurred, it’s just that the product sold out. So why do we call it an error?

The API call is not going as expected in the eyes of the customer, so we consider it an error. It might be on GetYourGuide’s side, it might be on the Connectivity Partner’s side, but for the customer it’s an error as they’re not able to make their booking.

Critical product deactivations for Invalid No Availability responses

We want to create booking experiences that just work. A customer shouldn’t experience errors when trying to book an experience from our mutual suppliers.

When a customer makes a reservation (by adding a product to their cart) we sometimes receive a no availability response, despite expecting the reservation to be successful. We then re-do the availability call. If the response indicates that there are, in fact, vacancies on the product, and thus the reservation call should have been successful, then we’ll deactivate the product so you can investigate what is causing the error. You’ll receive alerts when that happens.

Cut-off time overrides what the supplier puts in the portal 

Traditionally, suppliers would manually input their cut-off within our Supplier Portal. For all that have implemented this feature, their customers’ products’ cut-off time will be sent as part of the response to our availability call, allowing experience suppliers to adjust their cut-off and win more bookings. Implementing this feature also allows you to set different cut-off times for different timeslots, offering further flexibility.

The cutoff time in that response overrides what a supplier enters in the portal, so they do not need to manually update it there any longer.

Our Connectivity Engineering team’s mission

Finally, we learned that the Connectivity Engineering team’s mission is to: “Empower scalable inventory growth and create a seamless customer experience for connected products” - this is their north star, guiding everything from the product roadmap to how we handle retries.