Guide
A glossary of OTA connectivity terms.
The words that turn up in channel documents, integration calls and vendor demonstrations, defined plainly. Every figure quoted here is a requirement published by the channel named beside it.
Published by RezRoute · Last updated 24 October 2026
Systems
The four things people mean by a system, and one standard.
The first four terms are used interchangeably in conversation and mean different things in a contract. Sorting them out first makes the rest of the vocabulary easy. OCTO is listed with them because it is neither a system nor a vendor: it is an open standard that systems of this kind implement, and the one this service is certified against.
- Connectivity partner
- A company whose software carries availability and booking messages between the system that holds your calendar and a sales channel. A connectivity partner does not sell your tour and does not hold your seats. It answers the channel's calls on behalf of the system that does. Each channel decides which connectivity partners it will accept, through its own certification process.
- Reservation system
- The software that holds your calendar of record: departures, seats, prices, and the bookings written against them. It is the system that can say whether a seat is still free, because it is the system that gave the last one away. Reservation systems are normally paid products, and they usually carry the work around the calendar as well, such as point of sale, manifests, vouchers and reporting.
- Channel manager
- Software that distributes the same availability to several sales channels and keeps them in step. The term comes from hotels, where it is standard. In tours and activities the same work is often done by the reservation system itself or by a connectivity partner, so the word is used loosely. A channel manager that keeps its own copy of your availability has to reconcile that copy, and the gap before it reconciles is where overselling happens.
- Supplier API
- The interface a sales channel publishes for suppliers and their software to implement. It defines the calls the channel will make, the shape of the answers it expects, and how quickly they have to arrive. The GetYourGuide Supplier API has six mandatory endpoints: availability query, reservation, reservation cancellation, booking, booking cancellation, and an availability update notification that GetYourGuide hosts. Authentication is HTTP Basic in both directions, and every response is HTTP 200 with any error carried inside the JSON payload.
- OCTO
- OCTO is the open connectivity standard for tours, activities, and attractions. OCTO also runs a self-certification tool: a supplier endpoint or a reseller client that passes its validator in full receives a public certificate with a verification page. It is a conformance certification of the API, not a channel's certification and not a security audit. RezRoute holds both the supplier and the reseller certificate.
The moving parts
What a channel asks for, and what it expects back.
- Product identifier
- The code a channel uses to name one bookable product in every call it makes. It ties the tour as the channel knows it to the same tour in the system that holds the calendar, which is why an incorrect mapping sends a real booking to the wrong departure. GetYourGuide additionally issues one stable Supplier ID for each operator, which identifies the business rather than the product, and requires that mapping information is given to any supplier who asks for it within two business days.
- Option
- A variant of the same product that is booked separately: a different start time, language, duration, pickup arrangement or group type. Channels model options underneath the product, so availability and price are normally answered for an option rather than for the product as a whole.
- Availability
- The answer to one narrow question: on this date and start time, for this option, how many seats can still be sold and at what price. GetYourGuide asks live and sets response time targets in seconds, desired, ninety fifth percentile and longest acceptable: one, three and six for a single day, and five, ten and fifteen for thirty days or more. Viator asks live through its Availability Check API and also refreshes a cached calendar on a schedule, every two hours for the next two days and progressively less often further out.
- Reservation hold
- A temporary claim on seats while a traveller finishes paying. GetYourGuide asks for a hold window of sixty minutes and will not accept less than fifteen. If the booking call does not follow, the reservation is cancelled and the seats return to the pool. The hold is what stops a second channel being told the same last seat is free while a card is being charged.
- Booking reference
- The identifier a confirmed booking is known by. There are normally two of them: the reference the channel gives the traveller, and the reference in the system that actually wrote the booking. Cancellations, amendments and support requests are made against these references, so whoever answers the telephone needs to be able to see both.
- Cutoff
- How long before departure a product stops being sellable on a channel. It should match the time you genuinely need to count heads, brief a guide and print a list. A cutoff set wider than you need is not caution: it is late bookings you could have taken and did not.
Seats and prices
How access to a seat is granted.
- Allocation versus freesale
- Two ways to give a channel access to your seats. Allocation reserves a fixed number of seats for that channel, which caps your exposure but strands seats another channel would have sold. Freesale lets every channel sell from the same pool until it is empty, which sells more seats but is only safe when one system answers every channel from the same live pool.
- Per-person pricing
- A price expressed for each traveller and each traveller category, rather than for the booking as a whole. Viator supports per-person pricing only: tiered pricing and per-unit pricing are not supported. If a product is priced per unit today, for example one price for a whole vessel or vehicle whatever the number of travellers, that price has to be re-expressed per person before the product can be sold through Viator connectivity.
What a channel measures
The thresholds an integration is held to.
- Certification
- The channel's own process for confirming that an integration behaves correctly before it is allowed to carry live bookings. GetYourGuide runs three phases: initial self-testing, advanced self-testing, and then live testing with its Connectivity team. Certification is granted by the channel, so no supplier and no connectivity partner can honestly call itself certified by a channel until the channel has said so. OCTO certification is a different thing and has its own entry.
- Error ceiling
- The maximum share of failed calls a channel accepts over a calendar month, measured separately for each endpoint. GetYourGuide sets availability under 0.01 percent, reserve under 1 percent, book under 0.5 percent and booking cancellation under 0.5 percent, alongside an availability commitment of 99.8 percent per calendar month, where a call not answered within fifteen seconds counts as unavailable. Viator sets availability check under 1.5 percent, reserve under 1.5 percent and booking under 0.75 percent. These are contractual limits, not measurements of any particular system.
More guides
Related reading.
- How to connect your tours to GetYourGuide and Viator without paying for a reservation system
The three routes onto the channels, what each one costs in money and in attention, and the channel requirements that decide which are open to you.
- What a connectivity partner actually does in the GetYourGuide and Viator booking flow
The sequence of calls behind a channel booking, and which system is expected to answer each one.
- Do you need a reservation system to sell on Viator?
The short answer is no, and the longer answer is what a connection changes: the pricing constraint, the refresh cadence, and the requirement that applies to the system rather than to you.
- Selling on both GetYourGuide and Viator: how operators get double-booked and what prevents it
Why a copied calendar sells the last seat twice, and what has to be true of a system for that to be impossible rather than unlikely.