Understanding the Temporary Booking status

What does it mean?

This feature introduces a Temporary Booking status, designed to modernize our process, ensure better capacity management, and improve integration with third-party channels (OTAs).

The concept of a Temporary Booking is an important step that reserves inventory before the booking is fully confirmed or paid for, effectively acting as a 'Hold.'

• Goal: To align our booking process with market standards, especially for synchronous (inline webhook) API integrations.

• The hold mechanism: When a booking is started, capacity is reserved with the status TEMPORARY across all connected systems and subsystems. This prevents double-booking while confirmation is pending.

• Time limit: A timer (typically 45 minutes for API bookings) begins immediately. The booking must be completed within this window.

• Confirmation/Deletion:

  • If successful (e.g., confirmation is retrieved, or payment is made), the status changes to BOOKED.

  • If the timer expires, the payment fails (future feature), or the booking is canceled, it is automatically DELETED, and capacity is released immediately.

Current Implementation

Currently, this feature is only active for:

• API bookings coming from TourCMS when an inline webhook (synchronous notification webhook) is in place.

In this initial phase, the Temporary Booking is specifically used to manage the time required to retrieve a necessary external reference (e.g., from Vienna City Card or Vienna Pass via AVS) and transmit that back to TourCMS.

Note on Process: For this API-only phase, the process is two steps: 1) Create Temporary Booking (Capacity is reserved) and 2) Confirm or Delete (Based on the external reference outcome). The step for gathering customer data/payment is bypassed for now.

• New BoxOffice bookings when the seller reaches checkout.

Temporary bookings are available in the New BoxOffice to protect selected capacity while the seller is at checkout. When checkout is reached, the system creates a temporary booking from the current basket and the basket is closed. This hold prevents the same seats or capacity from being sold elsewhere while payment or final confirmation is still pending.

If the seller changes the cart after a temporary booking has already been created, the previous hold must be released before a new basket is created. Otherwise, the seller’s own temporary booking could continue holding the seats until the expiry job removes it, which can block the new basket on almost full departures.

1. The seller starts by creating a basket in New BoxOffice.

2. When they go to checkout, the system creates a TEMPORARY booking. This means the seats or capacity are held for a short time, and the basket is closed.

3. If the seller finishes the sale, the booking becomes BOOKED.

4. If the seller needs to change the cart before finishing, New BoxOffice starts a new basket and tells the system which temporary booking it is replacing by sending the old bookingId.

5. The system checks that the old booking belongs to that seller and is still TEMPORARY. Then it cancels that temporary hold, releases the seats or capacity, and creates the new basket.

6. The new basket checks availability only after the old hold has been released. This prevents the seller’s own previous hold from blocking the updated booking.

What should I do?

To enable Temporary Bookings for your eligible TourCMS API integrations, you must update your inline webhook URL as follows:

1. Locate your existing inline webhook URL in TourCMS.

2. Add ?temporaryBookingProcess=true to the end of the URL. This is a provisional, once the temporary booking is enabled for all the channels in future stages of the implementation, then it won’t be necessary to add this parameter.

This parameter is a provisional requirement. It is currently necessary to ensure temporary bookings function correctly. In future implementation stages, once temporary bookings are enabled across all sales channels, this parameter will be automatically handled and will no longer be required.

Example: https://api.palisis.com/tp/v1/tcms/webhook/notification/ABCD/EFGHI?temporaryBookingProcess=true

⚠️ Important: This is a fictional webhook URL provided for example purposes only. Do not use it.

How to identify a Temporary Booking?

Temporary Bookings are clearly marked throughout our system to distinguish them from confirmed reservations.

• Booking List & Manifest: They are visible on both the main Booking List and the Manifest, where they will be explicitly designated as 'Temporary'.

Booking list page

Booking detailed view

Manifest

• Departures Page: Temporary bookings also appear on this page reserving the corresponding seats.

• Reporting: Temporary Bookings are not included in standard Reporting or Cash Settlements.

Caveats

Please note the following technical and operational considerations regarding Temporary Bookings: