The Enhanced Shopping Transaction (EST) returns detailed room and rate information for multiple properties (up to 200 in a single transaction). The information includes room and rate descriptions, pricing information, policies and restrictions etc.
The transaction also supports many other features such as negotiated rate processing, user-specified timeouts, multipart responses, multiple languages etc. All these features are described in the sections below.
Simple Example
The following is a simple request for 1 adult and 2 children staying between 1-4 September. The example just contains two properties, although up to 200 are supported.
Note: The VersionCompliance attribute must always be sent to indicate that this is the ‘enhanced shopping’ version of MultiAvailability rather than the standard version described in section 0.
The response message shown below includes the available rooms and rates for the two requested properties. As the amount of information returned will vary by property, the first property (UI;12345) is an example of fairly comprehensive information, while the second property (UI;61829) is less detailed.