OCTO Releases Open Specification API for Travel Experiences

OCTO today announced the inaugural release of its messaging specification, which allows multiple trading partners in the tour, activity, and attractions industry to connect and communicate with each other without the need to create multiple API connections. The OCTO Core Specification V1 is an API specification with standardized field names, properties, and end points, and offers a new way for reservation systems, distributors, resellers, channel managers, and operators to save technical resources and time in connecting and communicating with each other.

“With the proliferation of distributors and booking systems in the growing travel experiences sector, connectivity for tours, activities, and attractions space has become increasingly difficult and expensive over the past ten years,” says Carrie Keplinger, Board President at OCTO. “This specification is already in use by 114 trading partners worldwide and that number is constantly increasing.  By using the OCTO Core Specification to build their APIs, these companies are saving months of development time.”

In the past, if a reservation technology platform wanted to connect to distribution partners such as resellers or channel managers, they must create a custom integration between their API and the partner.  With hundreds of reservation systems and distributions active in tours, activities and attractions, the number of unique custom integrations required by a single system has become expensive and time-consuming.  The OCTO Core Specification, and future capabilities, allow a reservation system to connect to any OCTO-compliant API without having to build a new integration, saving both time and money.

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Features and benefits of the OCTO Core Specification include.

• Supplier lookup
• Product lookup and batch search
• Availability check and calendar
• Booking search, reservation, confirmation, and cancellation

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The OCTO Core Specification is available and open source.  Any organization is free to use the specification at no cost. For more information about the OCTO Core Specification, visit https://octo.travel/specification.

About OCTO: OCTO Standards NP, Inc is a member based not for profit organization whose mission is to simplify connectivity for the tours, activities, and attractions industry.  OCTO actively works with its member companies and the industry to identify and resolve connectivity challenges by creating standardized messaging specifications that can be used by trading partners to simplify their API connections.

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