The Car Availability message allows the client application to request availability for cars from different car vendors.

Different parameters can be used to limit the search to specific vendors, car types, rate codes, etc.

For some providers following restrictions can exist (you can find an example in the example section below):

• If a car vendor is specified in the request, then you get a list of all available cars and rates for that vendor at the specified location.
• If no car vendor is specified in the request, then you get a list of cars from different vendors, but for each vendor you only get one (cheapest) or a limited number of offers, that matches your request options instead of all available cars and rates for each vendor.

When you want to request all cars for a vendor-specific car location (that you e.g. received from CarListRQ/RS) you have to specify the full location details as you received it from previous XX1 message, to make sure you get the results for the same car location. In this case you also have to specify the CarVendorCode in the /CarAvailabilityRQ/Preferences section to define, that this is a vendor -specific location for exactly this vendor.

If you want to get a cross-vendor list of results for a city, you will not specify the CarVendorCode in the /CarAvailabilityRQ/Preferences section and you also can not define a complete vendor-specific location cod, but you will only specify the /CarAvailabilityRQ/[PickUp|DropOff]/Location/CityCode instead.

 

There are several elements and attributes in this request and response message that are using OTA codes of different OTA categories to show information.

You can download the OTA code list from our Downloads section.

In some cases the OTA codes are currently not able to display all possible information. In these cases vendor-specific codes as there are returned from the provider system will be returned instead.