Existing resellers of tours, activities and attractions realise the difficulty associated with accessing and managing a disparate product source. The normal challenges of working with multiple APIs include coding to development environments that have nothing in common with the actual production environment. Or, of course, the outdated, non-existent, or incorrect documentation.
That’s why one of the core mandates of the Livn API enhancements was the ease of use for developers. We wanted to reduce the challenges normally associated with integrating with APIs, and instead do things differently.
Our API with the Q&A structure is a groundbreaking step forward in our sector. It may sound challenging at first, but we’re making things easy, and here’s how:
Design Philosophies, With a Difference
When it comes to ease of use, we had two design philosophies that underpinned our decision-making:
- Don’t be opinionated, be descriptive. By describing the current use of data instead of prescribing how to use it, everyone is open to more possibilities.
- Embrace standards where available. If none are available, be mindful that you might be setting a standard. There’s no reason not to comply with ISO and other formatting codes. It makes life easier for all involved.
Being mindful of this allowed us to create a platform that enables reseller technology partners to connect to thousands of tours, activities and attractions suppliers without having to worry about building, maintaining, and coordinating multiple API integrations.
The integration platform consists of a Product Warehouse and a Booking Engine, both of which are available behind one single distribution API, that currently does three things for resellers:
- Resellers get instant access to 20+ fully supported integrations connected to supplier systems via one distribution API.
- Livn takes care of harmonisation of data by mapping products in different supplier systems into one consistent product model in Livn’s Product Warehouse.
- Livn takes care of all the translations of API calls across downstream supplier integrations by having a single Booking Engine which keeps track of how to make booking and cancellation calls in different supplier booking systems.
4 Ways We’re Making the Livn API Easy to Work With
With our enhanced API, we set out to be different, and here’s how:
Comprehensive Documentation
We have published very comprehensive API documentation which explains in detail how our API works and how best to use it. We have also documented every class and model in our API making it straightforward to generate stubs and clients using Swagger Codegen or any OpenAPI code generator you prefer. So creating an API client from scratch is easy and quick.
Streamlined Integration Experience
We streamlined the integration experience for our partners by creating four "Mocker" products to rule them all. Once you implement the handling of these 4 product configurations, you have successfully covered the core functionality of our API, and you can rest assured that the offerings in your production catalogue will behave identically.
“Alice”
We understand that ‘seeing and doing’ often outranks reading when you try to check for something specific while getting familiar with a new API. So, we created "Alice", a comprehensively documented React client built on top of the Livn API.
It runs in your browser and allows you to inspect, modify, and post API payloads and JSON models whilst providing a simple UI to check the development against the design contract.
Full Support
Livn is more than just a software solution, our teams work with you every step of the way, not just at the start. That includes:
- 24/7 critical technical support and in-hours general support
- A dedicated integration and certification team
- Initial implementation planning assistance and business case analysis
- Supplier onboarding and product content teams
- Ongoing reviews with our Customer Success team, helping you to make the most of your investment
Ultimately, we don’t want our enhanced API to be daunting or difficult to work with, so we’ve made every effort to make it easy!
For more details on our API documentation, take a look at our Swagger page here: https://dev.livnapi.com/public/ Or, view our comprehensive developer guide here: https://dev.livnapi.com/public/Livn_API_v2.0_Developer_Guide.pdf