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CATEGORY: HOTEL


There are three methods by which Kelkoo.com can retrieve merchant hotel products:

A Live Data Feed

This is our recommended and preferred way of working with merchants as it is a robust technical solution that returns real time availability. It is a stable integration enabling the merchant to provide product availability. The merchant does the searching and provides Kelkoo with a list of products that are suitable for each individual user request. Kelkoo can format the request it feeds to the merchant to suit each individual merchant system. Outlined below are the search metrics that Kelkoo requires the user searching for a hotels to set.


http://www.yourcompany.com/search/kelkoo-hotels.pl?country=AAA &city=BBB &departuredate=CCC= &adults=DDD &children=EEE &rating=FFF &nbnights=GGG &nbrooms=HHH


Parameter

Description

Example

AAA

Country the user is looking for

"France,FR"

BBB

City the user wants a hotel in

"Paris"

CCC

The First date the user requires

"24/1/2005"

DDD

Number of adults for all rooms (semi-colon delimited), maximum of nine rooms

"3;2;0;0;0;0;0;0;0" (Three adults in the first room, two in the second)

EEE

Number of children for all rooms (semi-colon delimited), maximum of nine rooms

"1;2;0;0;0;0;0;0;0" (One child in the first room, two in the second)

FFF

The star rating of the site

"4"

GGG

Number of nights the hotels is needed for

"7"

HHH

Number of rooms requested (up to nine)

"2"




A Spider (screen scrape)

Kelkoo builds a spider adapter that crawls the merchant site acting as a web user. Each time a user submits a request on Kelkoo's hotel search form the spider will launch a search on the merchant site, proceed through the relevant HTML pages to retrieve products that match the users search.

On the merchant side, there is very little effort needed in the development of this method of implementation. However, Kelkoo only recommends this method if the Live Feed Option cannot be implemented.This is because a spider is sensitive to any changes on the merchant site. Therefore any small adaptations on the site could require an upgrade to the spider and result in the merchant missing from our result pages until this upgrade is completed.


The Data Feed Format

The data feed format describes the way we'd like to receive the results from your script. XML is our preferred format, alternatively each piece of information can be separated by another delimiter (comma, pipe, tab) and each product or by an end of line character.

An example of one product in our preferred XML format: 

  • <hotels>
    
        <hotel>

    
            <country>UK</country> 

    
            <city>London</city> 

    
            <name>London Bridge Hotel</name> 

    
            <location>London Bridge</location> 

    
            <address>234 London Bridge</address>

    
            <description>This is a fantastic hotel, located in the heart of London</description>

    
            <roomType>Double</roomType>

    
            <pictureUrl>www.company.com/picture/hotel.png</pictureUrl>

    
            <features>swimming pool;trouser press;mini-bar</features>

    
            <rating>5</rating>

    
            <priceincTax>50</priceincTax>

    
            <moreinfo>www.company.com/bookings/hotel</moreinfo>

    
    </hotel>

    
</hotels>