Availability, rates and inventory (ARI) pricing delivery mode ARI is recommended for partners that have nightly rates with restrictions, availability and inventory. This standard also supports promotional rates. Learn more about ARI
This article explains how you can migrate your Hotel Centre account to ARI.
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Before you begin
These features of pull or changed pricing are also supported in ARI:
- Room bundles: ARI generates room bundles by combining Room IDs and Package IDs defined in transaction (property data) messages. You can reuse these identifiers from transaction pricing, but be aware that:
- (RATE-PLAN-ID) in the landing page URL isn't used. RatePlanID in ARI messages is PackageID in transaction property data and (PACKAGE-ID) in landing page URL.
- ARI transaction (property data) supports
'delta'actions.
- Promotional rates: If you're using conditional rates to offer customised rates to users based on specific attributes, you can evaluate whether the Promotions API gives you the same capabilities. If you need to reuse rate rule IDs, let your technical specialist from Google know during your integration.
Notify Google during integration if you're using any of the following features:
- Custom fields in landing pages: Landing page(s) currently don't support custom fields from your price feed. Consider using an alternative hotel ID, brands or other landing page URL variables instead.
- Allowable points of sale in prices:: Although not currently supported, you can use alternative hotel ID and brand matching as alternatives.
- Conditional rates in prices: In ARI, you can implement conditional rates and private rates through rate rules and ARI rate modifications.
- Child occupancy in prices: You can use the ExtraGuestCharges message to define how to apply charges for additional adults and children.
Instructions
The process is completed in two phases: testing and migration
Testing
- If you've integrated your hotels through Hotel Centre, complete this interest form (Hotels). If you're a holiday rental partner, complete this interest form (VR).
- We'll create your Hotel Centre test account after we've processed your request (about two weeks).
- Develop and test the integration. Include your partner name in all ARI messages to prevent upload errors.
- Share your list of properties. You can reuse your property list from the current account by downloading the latest uploaded properties list and uploading it to the test account.
- Set up landing page(s). You can reuse your landing pages from the current account by downloading the landing page XML and uploading it to the test account.
- Share your room and property content.
- Share your prices with ARI.
- Certification
- Google will verify your list of properties and landing pages for any major differences between your accounts.
- Google will perform price accuracy checks on the test account.
- You can view any mismatches in your test account on Hotel Centre and the Travel Partner API with clear screenshots and root causes so that you can update the data as needed. Testing is complete when your test account has achieved a price accuracy score of 'Excellent'.
Migration
After testing is completed, you can pick a date with your technical specialist to start the migration. When you start, Google will update your Hotel Centre account so that you can share ARI in your existing account, in addition to any other way in which you were sharing rates with Google, like pull or changed pricing.
While prices will continue to be updated with pull or changed pricing, you can share rates with Google on ARI. However, note that if prices from multiple sources exist for the same property, we'll show the newest price, irrespective of the source.
If you're a changed pricing partner, you need to confirm with your Technical Account Manager (TAM) that you've migrated to the ARI and your old prices can be deleted. Old prices will generally be ignored if there are newer ARI prices, but they won't be auto-deleted.
If you're a pull or live query partner, your old prices will expire within four days after Google confirms your migration is complete.
Recommendations
- Send property data in small batches, rather than sending data for all of your properties at once.
- Send properties with ARI rates last. If you're sending push or pull rates in addition to ARI, this will cause the ARI rates to be shown when users search for these properties.
To certify your Hotel Centre account for ARI, Google will run price accuracy checks to verify integration quality and ensure that your price accuracy remains 'Excellent' for a period of three days. At that time, Google will switch your account completely to ARI.
Feature requests
If you'd like to suggest additional features for ARI to support, contact us.