Search Evaluation Web Services Overview

This section discusses using the Universal Policy Search Evaluation Web Services with both Travelport and non-Travelport search content. 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 another travel information provider.

Note: It is important to understand that Universal Policy applies policy on an entry-by-entry basis. If developers generate multiple search requests which they subsequently combine into a single response to display to their travelers, each entry sent to the Universal Policy endpoint is evaluated in isolation. Some policy settings may appear to display confusing results when separate result sets are combined.

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. You must call the policy-specific endpoints.

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 Non-Travelport Content Endpoints. The Policy Neutral Schema section provides a discussion of each request and response transaction, and example code.

All examples were created using the Travelport pre-production system. The pre-production Universal Policy Admin Portal can be accessed at

https://policyadmin.pp.travelport.com/PolicyEngineAdminUI/login.action

Sample XML and WSDL files for using the Search Evaluation Web Services with non-Travelport content are on the Downloads page.

Configuration Considerations for Non-Travelport Content

The Policy Admin Portal used to configure policies has been set up to use reference data to populate various dropdowns in the UI screens and to validate the data entered through the UI screens. The main use of reference data is for vendor code selection and validation.

When using the Search Evaluation Web Services with data obtained from a third party other than Travelport, that content sent to Universal Policy for policy evaluation may use vendor codes not present in the Travelport reference data, Travelport provides a means to add codes for external vendors to the policy database. These external vendor codes can be displayed either exclusively or alongside the existing Travelport reference data.

Note: If you need to use vendor codes not present in the Travelport reference data, contact your Travelport representative for information on the process for adding these codes to the policy database. You will need to provide Travelport a list of the external vendors, including the codes to use and a vendor name associated with each code. You will also need to specify whether you want to use only the external vendor codes or both external and Travelport vendor codes. If your supplied vendor codes conflict with the Travelport vendor reference data, your account will be configured to use only external vendor codes.

Note that when configuring hotel properties in a policy, Universal Policy normally validates the configured property against a table of known hotels. If you are using external vendor codes, this validation is skipped because Travelport does not have access to the property data. It is assumed that the policy administrator will accurately enter the property number into the configuration screens.