RON Introduction
Respax Operator Network (RON) is a real-time tour operator portal network connecting in real-time to major Australian and New Zealand tour operators. The Respax Operator Network enables development of interfaces to directly interact with each operator's reservation system. Typical usage include retrieving tour details with imagery, commit bookings live, check availability and pricing and much more.
While Respax provide a number of direct booking tools, we encourage system developers for travel agents and online portals to develop their own interfaces to RON and interface directly to their existing systems. Developing against the RON system gives the system integrator a bigger bang for the buck as they are developing against over 60 tour operators with a single development effort.
Integrating with RON
RON provides access to the Respax Operators through a simple XMLRPC API providing real-time availability, booking facilities with immediate confirmations and product content with images. THE RON API can be integrated with the agents system so that their staff can still use their existing, in-house reservation system but be interacting directly with the various Respax Operators.
The RON XMLRPC API is suitable for Travel Agents, Online Agents, Inbound Agents, Online Operators and Online Portals needing to develop a direct system-to-system interface between their system and the Respax Operators
Typical advantages include much reduced handling time for staff when dealing with a booking and much less waiting time for clients as they are interacting directly with the remote systems. Interacting directly with the Operators also means reduced training of the agents consultants. Instead of using individual booking interfaces for each operator, the agents consultants can now book each operator directly through their existing system which they are already trained to use.
RON also provides extensive caching of any information from the operator. The cache categories the data depending on importance of the cache data and how often its changed. Each category have individual cache expiry. For example, tour content and pricing are updated every 7 days. Availability is updated every 2 hours. Any booking is placed directly into the remote systems after a live availability check has been made.
Caching is the key to interacting with multiple remote systems as remote internet connections and systems has various degrees of reliability. The caching creates a much higher availability. Most data is available directly from the cache even if the remote system is down.
Developing against the RON system gives the agent a bigger bang for the buck as they are developing against many tour operators.
Detailed information and syntax to the Respax Operator Network API can be found on RON API