Impala’s Hotel Booking API makes booking a hotel as easy as sending a text message with Twilio or taking a payment with Stripe. Plus, you get rewarded. With every booking you make, you earn up to 15% in seller commission.
Hi Product Hunters! 👋
Thanks @harrystebbings for hunting us! My name is Toby, and I'm one of the co-founders here at Impala.
As a company, we set out to make every traveller happy and every trip perfect.
An important part of this is making hotel bookings as simple as possible. If you’ve ever wanted to integrate hotel room bookings into your app or website though, you’ll know it’s a long and expensive process that involves dealing with countless middlemen and outdated, closed APIs.
We've built the Impala Hotel Booking API to change that.
You can sign up in seconds, and use the API immediately. With two simple API requests you can search for hotels and rates, and make a booking in a matter of minutes.
Have any feedback or questions? Comment below and I'll answer them. 👇
We're excited to hear what you think, and even more excited to see what everyone will build using our APIs.
@josuegio Glad to be working with you and the rest of the GuruHotel team 😊
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@bochkovaleks@tobiasurff I'll be using this in my project and see if it makes sense with the vision.
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Congratulations Impalans! This would have saved us months of time compared to using Booking.com API. What are some of the more interesting use cases you imagine for hotel booking?
@davesuperman Thanks, Dave!
The companies we typically get the most excited about are those optimizing for a perfect experience for a subset of travellers. Those might be dog lovers (e.g. BringFido), remote workers staying for weeks or months (e.g. NomadX) or people looking for halal-friendly hotels (HalalBooking).
Another super interesting area for our API are developers and companies who approach travel bookings differently, be that through surprise travel (e.g. BeRightBack sends you on a fully-arranged weekend trip every few months) or travel memberships and clubs (e.g. TripAdvisor Plus or Prior Club offer memberships that bring perks to hotel bookings).
There are tons more use cases we're excited about – so many good ideas out there, we're excited to allow people to finally bring them to life without having to worry about connectivity!
Hi Toby - awesome product and so cool to see an API business extend to this industry. I was wondering if you've seen any customers use impala with low code to build support or operations apps?
@cuffejamie Thanks for the compliment!
This comes up a fair bit in conversations!
Some businesses don't want to fully integrate bookings in their websites as humans planning the trip is what makes them unique (wedding planners, surprise trip services, travel concierge providers) and have asked for a simple way to use the API for that. More commonly, our early adopter customers are looking for low-code solutions to help their customer support (e.g. someone calling to cancel or change a booking).
Internally, we're big fans of no-code and low-code solutions!
When Impalans travel, they use a mini online travel agent built in Retool that sends out confirmation emails and reminders using Zapier, for instance. It works great!
We're considering launching integrations and templates for low- and no-code use cases over the coming weeks and months, so watch this space!
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that's really cool - so we display the hotels which are already available, and we earn 15% commission? so I can basically just setup my own website which displays hotels and a customer books through it, and i make money right?
Hi @tan_ahmed! That's right, we allow you to start a travel business from scratch like that, or integrate selling hotel rooms into an existing project (without your customer ever having to leave your site). And you earn up to 15% on every room you sell.
Hi! We've explored APIs in the past - how comprehensive is your inventory compared to Metasearch providers like HotelsCombined or Kayak? How do the payouts compare?
@harry_yu1 hey! Big fan of Wanderlog from the sidelines.
The Booking API is designed to facilitate direct commercial relationships between you and large numbers of hotels at scale so while you can achieve a “payout” of 10-15% just from using our default agreed rates, you will also be able to negotiate direct rates with hotels that are specifically on brand for your product in < 5 clicks. This means the payout can get > 15%.
In terms of inventory, we have a lower volume of hotels today than meta because the relationships are deeper. We have 1500 hotels bookable today which will be closer to 20k+ by the end of the year.
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Do I understand correctly - you offer an API to be used by hotels, not by developers, who want to make a marketplace? For example - I’m a hotel owner and I can use your tool to install booking system on my website or app, correct?
@filip_kokoszynski hi! It’s actually the other way around, the Booking API is used by developers that want to build hotel bookings into their apps rather than the hotel themselves.
For example you can think of online travel agents and corporate travel platforms as major existing use cases but there’s also a lot of new innovative products being built in the space.
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@benwestephenson ok, I understand now. Sounds great :) where did you get hotels list? I think I saw that on your presentation
@benwestephenson@filip_kokoszynski Hi Filip! Once you sign up, right from within your dashboard there's a link to the full list of hotels (without code), and you can, of course, query, search and filter for hotels using the API itself as well.
@greggblanchard Thanks, Gregg!
We've built the hotel booking platform so that any hotel with a website or travel agent portal (in the case of larger hotel groups or franchises) can work with us – using rate shopping rather than PMS integrations.
Our long experience with PMS integrations through our first product (the Impala Stay Data API that enables hundreds of companies to provide better guest experiences during a stay, e.g. online check-in, keyless room access through mobile apps or in-room tablets) has shown that PMS integration is great, but high-friction for hotels.
With this product, we wanted to make it zero friction for any hotel to join our platform, no matter which PMS or channel manager they use – and our approach helps us achieve that vision.
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