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Developers > Flight > Guides > Rebooking

Overview

Assuming that

  1. John, Alice and their son Ben have booked flights from Shanghai to Beijing, leaving on 11th July and returning a day later on 12th July. Now they want to delay their return date by a week, coming back on 18th July instead. Note that voluntary rebooking may incur rebooking fees (same for the purchased ancillary products).

  2. if John’s family wants to rebook their trip simply because of airline-initiated flight schedule changes or other involuntary reasons, they can rebook free of charge (same for the purchased ancillary products).

What do you need to start?

All you need to get started with rebooking is the OrderID of the order you’d like to rebook.

The rebooking process happens in 5 steps:

  1. Query rebookability of segments

  2. Request and select rebooking offers

  3. Confirm rebooking offers

  4. Create a rebooking application

  5. Notify us of payment

1. Query rebookability of segments

If you want to rebook, you will need to, first of all, find out whether individual segments are rebookable or not, which depends on the applicable rebooking rules.

You can use the InquiryFlightRebookability API to query the rebookability of individual segments by the OrderID.

  • If you find out that individual segments are non-rebookable, then you are unable to rebook.

Under this circumstance, you can choose to renew your order, which means cancel the existing order and book a separate order where you can use your refunds from the old order, if there is any, to pay for the separate order. You may need to cover the price difference in case the price of the separate order is higher than the refunds.

  • If you find out that individual segments are rebookable, then you will need to request rebooking offers to start rebooking.

Assuming that the returning segments of John’s family are all rebookable. Then we go to the second step.

2. Request and select rebooking offers

To search for rebooking offers on the updated date of 18th July, you’ll need to create a rebooking offer request by calling our shopping offer API.

We will then return a list of available offers.

Assuming that John’s family has chosen a new return flight that they want. Then we can go to the third step.

3. Confirm rebooking offers

After John’s family has chosen a new return flight that they want, you then need to confirm this rebooking offer.

You should use the CreateRebookingOfferConfirmation API to confirm the rebooking offer.

The confirmation result can be obtained by inputting the rebooking token (BookingToken) and the verification token (VerificationToken) that you can get from the response of the CreateRebookingOfferConfirmation API into the QueryRebookingOfferConfirmationResult API.

  • If you find the result being SUCCESS, you can go on to create a rebooking application to actually start rebooking.

  • If you find the result being FAIL or INTERCEPTED, which means the selected offer is not available, you may need to try another offer.

  • If you find the result being IN_PROCESS, which means you need to wait for the exact results.

Assuming that the rebooking offer confirmation result is a success, then we can go to the next step.

4. Create a rebooking application

Now you can create a rebooking application to actually start rebooking for John’s family.

Note that usually you should charge the customer yourself before creating a rebooking application. Anyway, when you charge the customer depends on the payment arrangement between you and your customers.

You need to input the result of ConfirmOffer, OrderID, BookingToken, VerificationToken and other details into the ApplyRebooking API.

But it is still one step away from a successful rebooking.

To proceed, you must notify us of successful payment.

5. Notify us of payment

To finish rebooking, you need to call the PaymentNotify API to ask us to issue tickets by inputting the PaymentID that you can get from the response of ApplyRebooking API and specifying `PayScence ` (the payment scenario) as pay-for-rebooking.

You can just view notifying us of payment as a signal for us to confirm rebooking with the airline and go on to issue tickets.

What if there is no suitable flight for John’s family on 18th July?

Assuming that after you have requested rebooking offers and showed these offers to John’s family, they found that these flights are not acceptable in terms of the departure time or the rebooking fee. So John’s family does not want to choose any of them.

Under this circumstance, you can submit the rebooking enquiry form including rebooking expectations of John’s family to us who then will help you search for suitable flights.

  • If we are able to find suitable offers, we will inform you of the results from which you can select one. Then you just go back to confirm rebooking offers.

  • If we are unable to find a suitable offer within the specified time, we will still notify you of the result. Then it is up to you to decide what to do next, e.g. giving up rebooking and renewing the order (refund the existing order and book a separate order).

When should you pay us for a rebooking?

We do not usually demand instant payment from our distributors, but we often sell products and services to our distributors first and then generate bills after a certain period.

Therefore, 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.

Rebooking API reference

please refer to Rebooking Service.

Where to go from here?

Learn how to pay us for a rebooking (please refer to Settlement.