Travelport Universal Policy Web Services Overview

For companies seeking to optimize their business travel spending, Travelport offers Universal Policy for creating and applying corporate travel policies. Companies and travel agencies can tailor air, car, and hotel shopping responses with corporate travel policy attributes, or policy rules.

Once configured, policy rules can be used to control and identify the content returned in a shop response. Policy rules can identify shop responses as in-policy or out-of-policy, and preferred or non-preferred. Policy rules can even completely exclude certain items from a shop response, such as when employee travel is not allowed on certain vendors. Policy rules can be configured by criteria such as vendors, rate and fare maximums, geographic locations, and dates.

Universal Policy works with online booking tools and agency point-of-sale systems, as well as shop responses from Travelport Universal API and even non-Travelport sources. Travelport provides Universal Policy both as a web-based application providing a user interface for policy administrators, and as a collection of SOAP web services directly for developers.

The Universal Policy Admin Portal provides browser-based screens for configuring policy.
The Universal Policy Admin Web Services allow any corporate booking tool (CBT) to configure and retrieve policy data without using the Universal Policy Admin Portal.
The Universal Policy Search Evaluation Web Services can be used to apply policies to a set of search results. These search results can obtained from Travelport, or from any travel information provider.

This online help provides documentation for using the Admin Web Services to configure policy, and the Search Evaluation Web Services to apply configured policy to search results obtained from a non-Travelport source. Other ways of using Universal Policy are summarized on this page, along with links to their documentation.

Note:

For an overview of how Universal Policy works, see Universal Policy Summary.
For a list of important terms to understand when using Universal Policy, see the Glossary.

Configuring Policy

Before policy can be applied to search results, travel policies must be configured and attached to policy groups. Travelport provides both a user interface and web services for configuring and managing policy.

Configuring Policy via Universal Policy Admin Web Services

The Admin Web Services section of this documentation provides detailed information about using web services to set up and manage policy, including the endpoints to use, a discussion of each request and response transaction, and example code. Downloads of sample files and WSDLs are on the Downloads page.

Configuring Policy via the Universal Policy Admin Portal

As an alternative to the Admin Web Services, policy can be configured through the Universal Policy Admin Portal, which is detailed separately in the Universal Policy Admin Portal online help. The Admin Portal help provides the most comprehensive information about configuring policy and is a valuable resource for developers using Universal Policy Admin Web Services. It explains how policies are created and assigned to policy groups, and describes all options available for each type of policy.

Applying Policy to Search Results

After policy is configured for your agency or company via either the Admin Portal or Admin Web Services , policy can be applied to travel search results. These results can be obtained through Travelport or through another travel information provider.

The Search Evaluation Web Services section provides detailed information about using web services to apply policy to both Travelport and non-Travelport content, including the endpoints.

Applying Policy to Travelport Content

To apply policy to travel data obtained through Travelport, Universal Policy works with Travelport Universal API to gather search results and apply policy to them. At a high level, Universal API and Universal Policy work together as follows:

The caller sends a search request to the Universal Policy endpoints.
Universal Policy sends the search request through Universal API.
Universal API returns results to Universal Policy.
Universal Policy applies the appropriate travel policies and returns the results to the caller.

Applying Policy to Non-Travelport Content

Alternately, Universal Policy Search Evaluation Web Services can be used with shop data from any travel information provider:

The caller performs a search request of non-Travelport content prior to calling Universal Policy.
The caller sends that search response data to Universal Policy.
Universal Policy applies policy to that non-Travelport search data and returns the annotated response to the caller.

For non-Travelport content, use the Policy Neutral Schema. The Search Evaluation Web Services section includes a discussion of each request and response transaction, and example code. Downloads of sample XML and WSDL files are on the Downloads page.