Rail Shopping and Booking

The following table represents a basic, end-to-end flow for Rail Booking. Some transactions are optional, or can be performed as stand-alone functionality that is separate from the shopping and booking business flow.

Feature

Description

Rail Availability

or

Rail Low Fare Shopping

Required. Either Rail Search or Low Fare Shopping can be used to request itinerary segments.

  • Rail Availability requests rail segments that meet the requested search parameters. A number of modifiers can be used to narrow the search results.
  • The same request that is used to shop for airfares can also be used to shop for rail fares. Low Fare Shopping functionality combines availability and a fare quote request to return the lowest available fares for a specified itinerary, using origin/destination and date information.

Seat Map

Optional, stand-alone transaction. Requests coach information about a specific train on a specific route.

Rail Booking

Required. Creates a rail reservation based on the segment and rate results from the Rail Search response.
Rail Samples

Sample XML transactions for Rail workflows.

Provisioning

Please contact your Travelport support representative with any questions about provisioning or see the Getting Connected page for information on credentials.

Programmatic Log Out

Universal API includes a programmatic logout for the Rail service to minimize the use of resources within rail supplier systems. This log out release rails distributor sessions that are no longer required. Logouts occur after Universal API receives any of the following transaction responses:

If a log out request is not sent to the rail distributor, they lock the reservation until a time-out occurs. (The length of the time-out varies by distributor.) While the reservation is locked, no updates can be made to it.

If an unsuccessful response is returned from these services, Universal API does not send a logout request. Also, successful shop response does not trigger the logout.