Glossary

An offer request describes the passengers and where and when they want to travel.

A journey represents a trip that the passengers want to make between a particular origin and a particular destination on a particular date. For the origin and destination, simply provide the IATA code for an airport (for example PVG for Shanghai PuDong International Airport) or for a city (for example SHA for Shanghai, which covers multiple airports).

Inside each journey, you will see one or more specific flights that will get the passengers where they want to go. Each flight is referred to as a segment. A journey from Shanghai(PVG) to Beijing(PEK) could be direct, made up of only one segment. If there are one or more connections, then we have multiple segments.

An itinerary represents all the journeys the passengers want to make to finish the whole trip.

The ticket number is a 13-digit number that you will find on both the passenger receipt and the boarding pass. The ticket number is often separated by a hyphen, e.g. 781-1234567890.

Voluntary means a passenger can not travel as planned and thus wants to change his or her itinerary due to voluntary reasons, e.g. the passenger needs to travel to another destination.

Under such circumstances, refund or rebooking maybe chargeable, but that depends on applicable refund or rebooking policies.

Involuntary means a passenger can not travel as planned due to involuntary reasons, e.g. reasons like force majeure including airport control, inclement weather, emergencies force a carrier to cancel or reschedule a flight.

Under such circumstances, refund or rebooking maybe free, but that depends on applicable refund or rebooking policies.

Ancillary products are a general term for products other than the flight ticket purchased by customers. They can be bought together with, after or without the air ticket.

Tickets are booked directly with airlines by calling the API offered by an airline, with no ticket agents or other third-party intermediaries involved, but an OTA like Trip.com is still involved to book tickets from airlines on behalf of customers.

After submitting an order to us, distributors need to notify us of successful payment of the order so that we can update the payment status.

You can just view notifying us of successful order payment as a signal for us to confirm an order with the airline and go on to issue tickets, and when your customers should pay for the order depends on the payment arrangement between you and your customers.

The Q MailBox contains queue messages concerning refund, rebooking and issuing from airlines. Trip.com will send these messages to distributors by parsing strings or texts from GDS（eTerm）.

Companion-travelling is often aimed at people who can not travel alone safely and thus need help during travel, such as minors, the differently abled, or reduced-mobility people.

For example, medical travel companions fly with travelers who need assistance to complete their journey. They make the trip from Point A to Point B easier for those with injuries, disabilities and older travelers who want support when flying.

Another example is an adult accompanying a minor who maybe under 18 and thus can not travel alone safely.

An accompanying passenger can be a medical travel companion or an adult or other person(s) designated by the passenger to travel with them while an accompanied passenger can be a minor or an elder.

Some airlines require that linked companion-travelling orders should be marked with notes signifying their accompaniment. For example, the order of accompanied minors and the order of accompanying adults.

There are 2 categories of companion-travelling orders: orders of accompanied passengers and orders of accompanying passengers.

After the tickets have been issued, passengers can not travel as originally planned due to various reasons ( voluntary or involuntary), so they want to rebook, such as date change, upgrading or rerouting(rerouting is only available for some airlines), to meet their changed travelling needs.

If a passenger wants to rebook, the passenger will ask the distributor with whom the passenger has bought a ticket to help with rebooking by submitting a rebooking enquiry form to the distributor which includes his or her rebooking expectations including the traveling date and a price range.

After receiving the rebooking enquiry form, the distributor will use Trip.com’s real-time shopping offer API to look for a suitable flight that meets the passenger’s rebooking expectations. However, if there is no offer returned from this real-time shopping offer API or the offer returned simply is not what the passenger expects, then the distributor will submit the rebooking enquiry form to Trip.com to inform of the passenger’s rebooking expectations. Then Trip.com will help the distributor to look for a suitable offer for the passenger. Whether or not Trip.com is able to find a suitable offer, Trip.com will notify the distributor of the results within a period of time.

It is up to the distributor to decide what to do next after receiving the results from Trip.com.

The internal name of surface is the short-distance overland transfer between different airports or between different transport hubs. If a passenger is transferring to another flight that departs from a different airport, the passenger may need to use "surface" to get from the current airport to the next airport.

For example, if a passenger wants to book a new flight, agencies should help this passenger with booking by contacting with airlines.

For example, if a passenger wants to book a new flight, they can go to the check-in counter for help.

For example, after a passenger has changed his or her travel date, the ticket will be reissued. Sometimes, the original ticket number will still be used.

For example, after a passenger has changed his or her travel date, the ticket will be reissued. Sometimes, the original ticket number will be discarded and a new one will be used.

An airline schedule change refers to any modification to a passenger’s scheduled flight itinerary at any point prior to flight departure due to involuntary reasons or so-called force majeure, such as airport control, inclement weather, emergencies. These changes can range from a one-minute delay all the way up to a completely canceled flight.

In addition, a flight may suffer schedule changes more than once.

Refund or rebooking under this circumstance is often free, however, voluntary refund or rebooking is often chargeable.

If a flight schedule change (usually considered as an involuntary) occurs, an airline needs to have backup plans for passengers to complete their journey. This is where a backup flight comes in.

Faced with flight schedule changes, an airline will first move passengers to a backup flight and reserve seats for them on the new flight. In general, the airline will choose its own flight closest in time to the previous flight, however, if this airline has no suitable flight, passengers may be moved onto a flight of another airline that has a transfer agreement with this airline.

Sometimes flight schedule changes can happen not only once, so we hereafter use the phrase "the previous flight" or "the original/ originally planned flight" to refer to the flight prior to a new schedule change.

A VCC (virtual credit card) is an additional Visa credit card issued on top of the primary card. It is not physical, and all card information, including card number, expiry date, and CVV number can be accessed online.

It should be noted that VCC is usually used for online settlement with us.

Refund means that a customer returns a purchased and issued ticket in exchange for money previously paid due to voluntary or involuntary reasons.

If an order is not yet issued, we tend to call it "cancel an order" to distinguish it from refunding an already issued order.

It means the action of distributors and Trip.com respectively paying for the delivered orders and services of a billing/settlement cycle through a certain settlement method (the billing/settlement cycle and the settlement methods are agreed between us in advance).

It should be noted that we will bill our distributors for products and services over a billing/settlement cycle that is agreed upon between us in advance, e.g. every one week, every one month.

Airline ticketing time limit, also known as ADTK.

It is the deadline for tickets to be issued. It is calculated from the PNR creation date and may be changed upon booking adjustment.

Please note that if travel agents fail to issue ticket for the customer before the ticket time limit date/time, the segments will be automatically cancelled by the airlines who have such policies.

It means the deadline before which you must pay for a booking, a rebooking or something else.

It means that a certain offer that is returned by Trip.com may only be available to a certain group of passengers who, during booking, need to indicate their qualifications, age or the count of passengers, e.g. offer A can be consumed only by Chinese students overseas while offer B needs to be consumed by at least three passengers.