Expedia

Owned by Mayank Gupta
Last updated: May 27, 2024 by Darshan Sangawar
3 min read

Reseller Description

Expedia Group, Inc. is an American travel technology company founded in 1996 that owns and operates travel fare aggregators and travel metasearch engines, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, and many more. The Expedia QuickConnect solution (EQC) is a simple interface that allows hotel properties to communicate updates in rates and availability automatically to Expedia and electronically retrieve bookings made on any Expedia Inc. platform (including all points of sales and affiliates).

Tasks Supported by this connection

  1. Export Availabilities
    Reservability is exported to Expedia either from accommodation type or unit depending upon the linking level the client chooses in Maxxton.
    In addition to existing reservations, it's important to consider other factors that can affect the availability of properties on Expedia:

    1. LOCK: Users can apply a 'lock' status to an Accommodation-type or unit, effectively blocking its availability for a specified period across all Distribution Channels (DCs). During this time, the property cannot be booked, and the system communicates 'Zero' availability to resellers.

    2. Stop-Sell: Another factor impacting availability is the 'Stop-Sell' feature. With 'Stop-Sell,' users can designate the blocking of an Accommodation-type or unit for a specific Reseller (associated with a particular DC). This action restricts bookings for that Reseller only, while availability remains unaffected for others. Detailed instructions on adding and configuring different types of 'Stop-Sell' are available under Reseller configuration → Stop-sell

  2. Export Prices(Multiple rate types)
    We have two types of pricing 

    1. Per day pricing: Per day prices (nightly prices) are sent directly as they are configured in ‘Rates’.  It's important to note that special prices cannot be sent to Expedia when on ‘Per day’ pricing.

    2. Length of stay pricing: In length of stay pricing (LOS), maximum stay prices are sent for each arrival date. Initially, LOS prices get uploaded on Price Cache where the final price is calculated, considering special and other factors. Subsequently, then these final prices are exported to Expedia.

  3. Import Reservations (Multiple rate types)
    We support the below reservation requests

    1. Book- It is a new reservation request

    2. Modify - It is a modification request

    3. Cancel - It is a cancellation request

Steps to connect with preconfigured properties at Expedia

  1. Client gets in touch with Expedia to create hotels and rooms at their side and do necessary configuration.

  2. Simultaneously client is requested to create the Expedia reseller in MXTS. The steps to create/activate a new connection are shown on Reseller Configuration | ResellerConfiguration Howtolinkanewreseller?

  3. Above step will create the Expedia reseller in MXTS and the system will auto-add mandatory settings, however, the remaining configuration related to linking of properties needs to be taken care of by the user

  4. Client is requested to create a JIRA ticket with a heading like “Connection with Expedia” and add all important information in the same and assign the ticket to support-connection@maxxton.com so the connection team is aware of your interest in connecting with the reseller and they can assist you with all the queries you post in this ticket

  5. Create a new DC for the reseller Expedia and make sure that all the identified resources should have that DC selected/added in their representation

  6. Create an employee if not present and make sure that the AO (Admin Organization) & all the Resorts are linked to the newly created employee

  7. Create the linking for Expedia hotel/room with MXTS properties in Linked Accommodation Types card. Please click on Reseller Configuration | ResellerConfiguration HowtoActivatenewAccommodationType(s) to see steps on how it is done.

  8. Make sure that the ‘Pricing type’ (LOS or Per-day) defined for the Location in Maxxton is also the same on the Expedia extranet side.

  9. Once the above process is done, please contact support connection team and they will complete a few final steps and make price & availability uploads for the linked properties to Expedia

  10. You can then monitor the reseller Expedia from the https://maxxton.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TP/pages/13699583

Supported settings/features

There are a lot of supported settings/features that Maxxton offers to their customers which adds value to their connection with Expedia. A few of the settings are mandatory settings related to the endpoints, etc, which get added by the system automatically when the user creates the Expedia reseller in MXTS. However, a few other feature settings can give you much-needed convenience in setting up certain things your way.

Expedia-specific settings are mentioned below

  1. DC code for Expedia channel
    We can assign specific DC on which the reservations should be created based on the Source code we received from Expedia in the reservation XML.

  2. Dummy Price
    Expedia does not accept ZERO prices for the linked Accommodation types. So for the days for which we do not have prices configured in Maxxton software, we send the Dummy rate as 9999.