Everything you need to sell accommodation online, with worldwide accommodation inventory, competitive rates with commission, and a developer-friendly API to power your incredible customer experiences.
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Posted by Duffel
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I’m Steve, founder and CEO of Duffel. Today we're thrilled to launch Duffel Stays - our new API for selling accommodation. A game changer in the travel industry, delivering a single easy-to-integrate platform to sell flights and now accommodation.
🏨 The Problem
Until now, selling accommodation requires you to integrate multiple complex hotel APIs, navigate lengthy contract discussions, negotiate commission and competitive rates, and aggregate those rates into a coherent shopping experience, which can be a real challenge.
🛏️ The Solution
Enter Duffel Stays! Stays removes that complexity for you with instant access to over 1 million properties worldwide, competitive rates and commission negotiated on your behalf, and a developer-friendly API, freeing you to innovate and deliver incredible customer experiences.
💫 Highlights
• Aggregation of multiple sources to give you access to over 1 million properties worldwide, giving you a breadth of content and rates so that your customers can always find somewhere that suits their needs.
• Market-competitive rates – whether you’re accessing your customers’ own corporate negotiated rates, or rates we negotiate with hotels worldwide on your behalf, you’ll always have access to rates your customers expect.
• Commission paid out for every completed stay, helping your business to grow.
• Detailed information on each property, including photos, descriptions, rating and amenities to help customers find their perfect stay. We use multiple data sources to ensure you always have the most up-to-date and accurate information.
• Shop with your customers’ loyalty numbers across all major hotel chains to gain access to exclusive loyalty discounts, included extras, and points collection.
• Ease of integration with your platform. Our intuitive and developer-friendly API is supported by comprehensive documentation, client libraries and technical support.
🚀 Duffel Stays is the next step on our mission to make travel effortless. We can’t wait for you to try our solution and hear your feedback.
Thanks!
I think what separates Duffel from a "regular API" is that the team have perfectly explored the problem space to find out what might block new travel solutions from being found — whether from a startup or an existing software team.
I can't wait to jump into the code on this one myself.
Bravo, Steve and team (More of this, please!)
Thanks for the kind words Kevin!
Do customers need to apply for an ATOL license before they can use your flights and hotels for bookings or do you plan to apply for a central ATOL number that customers can use?
Thanks for sharing with the Travel Massive community and as always it's fantastic to see new travel tech innovations being launched in 2023!
Couple of quick questions:
1. Do you envision customers pairing Duffel Stays with your flight booking API to build solutions (e.g. offering flights and accommodation combined in one consumer transaction), or are there also use cases for customers who will only use the accommodation API to build non-flight solutions?
2. Do you plan on rolling out Duffel Stays to all developer accounts, or is it only available on a per-request basis?
3. Is there an Elixir SDK in the works? That would be ace... 😁
Thanks Ian!
1. We have a couple of ideas here, nothing to announce yet!
2. Per-request basis for now but the goal is to roll it out more widely
3. Sadly no 😞 Kinda unbelievable for a company that runs on Elixir!
This looks really cool!
One thing I miss from hotel APIs is the ability to do geofenced searches. Particularly when building an interface that integrates with a map, it's more important to me to have the results geofenced rather than proximity based. That would be a nice addition to have.
Is the booking step only possible through the API at the moment, or are you providing a no-code solution for that as well? I only see the no-code option for flights
* p.s. a minor niggle -- accommodation is spelled wrong in your video.
Thanks Peter!
Geofenced search - to restrict the search results to within a specific area?
I'm curious, what do you envisage that looking like, and what scenario have you been looking to use it for?
i.e. Relevance to a place of interest? Results near country boundaries? Or something else?
Booking is only possible via the API or our agent dashboard today. We haven't yet added it to our no-code offering, but it is absolutely something we're considering.
Oh, and good eyes on the spelling, alas, we only spotted that after we went out with the launch.
There are 2 specific reasons for geofenced searches.
1. Basic geofencing for showing accommodation results on a map. As the map pans, search results are updated based on the bounds of the map. Possibly that generates too many requests, in which case the user may have a "Refresh results" button pop up after panning the map. There actually has to also be some smarts about this so it doesn't have all the results lumped together geographically. I have implemented this in past by having all accommodation in an Elasticsearch index, but that then requires me to keep an ES index up to date which obviously I'd rather avoid ;)
2. Geofencing based on shape data can be used to create search results for eg.. regions that I could define myself. Say I want to create a region called "Yarra Valley", I could create the shape for that and regardless of whether you have that region in your system, I could fire off searches for accommodation within that area.
Congrats on the launch.
Looks interesting. I'm curious to learn more about your supply, DAC7 handling etc.