How To Reduce API Errors
Customers hold an exceptionally high standard when it comes to their booking journey. Seamless booking experiences are no longer a nice-to-have – they’re table stakes.
From our own data, we know that one misstep during the process of booking an experience results in lost revenue for connectivity partners and their suppliers.
We want to change that. We want to maximise revenue for suppliers and connectivity partners by creating booking journeys that just work.
Here’s how we can achieve that together:
Use the integrator portal
A good starting point is to use our tools to identify the root cause of your system’s ongoing issues and implement our suggested solution. We recommend using the performance analytics (link, login required) section of our Integrator Portal to identify the root causes responsible for the largest share of your errors and prioritise your roadmap accordingly.
Implement the latest API features
Next, we’d suggest implementing our latest recommended features. These are a set of features that we’ve seen have the biggest impact in reducing error rates across our 150+ connectivity partnerships. You can check out the details of each of these in a recent post.
Improve response times
Response times can drive up error rates in calls to all endpoints due to time-outs. They can also be hard to identify – they may appear successful in your system, whilst we observe a time-out on our system. In addition to ensuring monitoring and alerts are in place for your own system, we’ve outlined SLAs for response times that should ensure optimum technical performance for your suppliers. Response time issues particularly affect systems that act as a channel manager, and channel managers should work closely with their partners to safeguard system speed and improve performance.
Create exceptions and errors in line with specification:
Responding to an API call with a correct exception for each scenario allows us to better understand the root cause of errors. This then allows us to design and implement automations that fix errors at scale. You can see a summary of how errors should be sent in our Integrator Portal.
Ensure availability and pricing configurations are set up
In our Supplier Administration portal, suppliers can map their own products if they are using a reservation system that has enabled this process with us.
Our platform supports two types of availability (time-point and time-period) and 2 types of pricing (per individual or per group), so any supplier can create a product in our platform with any of the 4 possible combinations of these types of availability and pricing:
Time-point for Individuals
Time-point for Groups
Time-period for Individuals
Time-period for Groups
To avoid errors occurring when a supplier tries to map products, we recommend ensuring that your integration supports the four different combinations of availability and pricing that we offer.
Testing Tools
You can use our testing and production testing tools in the Integrator Portal to validate your support for all types of product configuration.
Establish error monitoring processes and action incident notifications
When an error occurs, categorizing it according to our API specification facilitates automatic responses to errors, error handling and debugging. The automated email notifications will be sent to Suppliers and Connectivity Partners whenever there is a prolonged incident involving one or more bookings and one or more products.
In order to proactively monitor these issues on the partner side we suggest taking advantage of monitoring tools such as Sentry, Airbrake, NewRelic, Datadog, or Kibana. If you already have an integration with GetYourGuide, you can also regularly check the Integrator Portal Analytics Performance section.