API connection types
This page gives information about the different ways to use the API
Contents
Connecting your PMS to Beds24 as a channel manager
Purpose
Your PMS has availability, price and booking information. By connecting with Beds24, OTA channels can be kept up to date.
Overview
The availability and price information for each room type is sent from your PMS to Beds24
Bookings from the OTA channels are sent from Beds24 to your PMS. There is no need to send your bookings to Beds24 or have Beds24 send price and availability to your PMS
Initial setup and mapping
The roomtypes created in Beds24 should best match those at your PMS and the channels you want to connect with.
The initial setup and mapping of roomtypes is best done in the Beds24 extranet, each channel has tools and an instruction about the requirements for the channel.
API Functions
Sending inventory to Beds24
The most appropriate API functions depend on whether you decide to use rates or daily pricing within Beds24, usually daily pricing is the best option.
Use JSON setRoomDates to send availability, up to 16 prices and optionally minimum stay for each date.
Each of the prices can be mapped within Beds24 to different groups of channels or to different rate codes within a channel.
Sending Bookings to your PMS
Use JSON getBookings to retrieve booking information.
A good strategy is to setup a Push Notify URL in Beds24 at Settings > Properties > Link
When a booking is created or modified, Beds24 will call this URL with the booking number. Your system can respond by calling JSON getBookings to retrieve details of the booking.
It is also a good idea to periodically poll jsonGetbookings (about every half hour) for any bookings modified since the last poll in case something goes wrong with the push notification.
When a booking arrives from a channel, Beds24 will automatically reduce the availability at all connected channels, there is no need to resend an updated availability from your PMS to Beds24.
When a booking is created directly in your PMS, you should update the availability value in Beds24 for those dates to reflect the new value, this will be sent to the connected channels.
