Air Booking with Guaranteed Payment

Some carriers do not accept a form of payment as part of the booking (AirCreateReservationReq/FormOfPayment), and perform ticketing functions outside of electronic or paper tickets. These ticketless carriers may or may not also be a Guaranteed Payment Carrier (GPC), which requires payment at the time of booking using the GUAR SSR.

Request

An Air Booking request can be submitted without knowledge of a carrier's Guaranteed Payment Status. If the carrier status is known, two attributes of AirPricingSolution/AirSegment indicate the ticketing and guaranteed payment status for a given air segment.

The Eticketability attribute with a value of 'Ticketless' indicates the segment is on a ticketless carrier.
The GuaranteedPaymentCarrier attribute indicates a ticketless carrier that requires guaranteed payment.

If a carrier requires guaranteed payment, the ticketing status and guaranteed payment are sent in the Air Booking:

Guaranteed payment data is sent as a GUAR SSR, with the traveler's credit card information sent as free text. For example:

The card holder name entered in the SSR is assumed to be the passenger in first Name field.

Note: Some Guaranteed Payment Carriers (GPCs) may use a different SSR format. Travel providers should confirm that the SSR format is acceptable to the GPC.

The ticketing status of 'Ticketless' is sent in the Eticketability attribute of AirCreateReservationRequest/AirPricingSolution/AirPricingInfo.

Response

An Air Booking response is returned. If the Air Booking request was submitted without knowledge of a carrier's Guaranteed Payment Status, the carrier is a GPC, and:

No credit card is included in the FormOfPayment attribute, a warning is returned in the response, indicating that the carrier is a GPC and a credit card is required for payment.
A credit card is included in the FormOfPayment, a GUAR SSR is automatically generated and returned in the response.

Because the request for guaranteed payment is a "manual" process, travel providers should confirm the PNR data in the queue after the booking is completed. The travel provider should ensure that the supplier has accepted the booking and deal with any errors from the supplier that are communicated after the provider responds to the initial book request.

Any response remarks returned from the supplier are not interpreted by Universal API and are passed along directly in the response.

Note: While most responses from suppliers are returned in a matter of seconds, a supplier has 24 hours to issue a response. If an unconfirmed status (e.g., 'NO' or 'UN') is returned, the travel provider should retrieve the booking at a later time to confirm the vendor's response.

Errors

If a Form of Payment other than a Credit Card is provided for a Guaranteed Payment Carrier, a validation error is returned: "Credit Card FOP required to send payment info during Booking for Guaranteed Payment carrier-XX,YY" where XX, YY are the marketing carriers."
If a credit card does not exist, an error is returned indicating a credit card is required.

Exceptions

Worldspan