Universal Records and Bookings

The Universal Record locator (UR) identifies a traveler's entire booking file, including traveler information as well as booked air, vehicle, and hotel segments. A single Universal Record can contain booking data (PNRs) from one or more providers that supplied the data for the bookings.

Individual travel segments may also contain additional record locators from providers and confirmation numbers from suppliers (air, vehicle, and hotel vendors). See Content Providers and Definitions for information about the types of booking records and data sources used in Universal API.

Note: Customers can improve their bookability by following Travelport’s recommended Air Workflow best practices. These best practices provide a workflow that will assist you in realizing more successful bookings and fewer sell failures. For example, one Travelport customer went from an average sell failure rate of 13.43% in January to a sell failure rate of 0.55% in February, simply by modifying their API workflow.

Functionality

Description

Creating Universal Records

Universal Records are created automatically as part of the initial booking process for a journey when an air, vehicle, or hotel segment is booked.

Existing PNRs from Universal API providers can also be imported to create a Universal Record.

Following the air bookability workflow reduces errors to improve bookability rate.

Searching for Universal Records

Universal Record searches can be made using data from a PNR that is part of the Universal Record.

Retrieving Universal Records

With a known Universal Record Locator, a Universal Record must be retrieved to modify or cancel all or part of the Universal Record.

Modifying Bookings

Changes can be made to the following items through the Universal Record:

Canceling Bookings

Canceling an existing booking can occur at several levels:

Requesting a Universal Record History

Universal Record History provides tracking for the creation and modification of a Universal Record throughout its lifetime in the Universal API.

Linking Universal Records

Linking two or more Universal Records to each other if the records have a business relationship, such as travelers or travel groups in separate records who are traveling together.

Saving Trips

Saves trip data without booking the trip for later retrieval.