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Create a Price feed (formerly Transaction message)

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To provide Bing your hotel pricing and availability data, create an XML document that contains a Price feed. The Price feed contains a list of check-in dates, lengths of stay, and pricing.

Price feeds may contain up to 180 days of advanced booking, and each booking may specify up to a 14 nights stay. A check-in date and length of stay is referred to as an itinerary. If you specify the maximum number of itineraries, the message would contain 2,520 itineraries.

Price feeds are limited to 100 MB of uncompressed data or 10 MB of compressed data (using GZip compression). To reduce network traffic, you should send compressed data.

A Price feed should contain only itineraries that you're adding or updating—do not include itineraries that have not changed since the last time you sent a message.

The document must use UTF-8 encoding and must conform to the Transaction XSD.

Important

You must read and follow all Hotel Price Ads policies. For the list of policies, see Pilot programs policies.

Note

Bing does not support all Transaction XSD elements. Bing ignores any element or attribute in the message that it does not support. The Price feed Reference includes only those elements and attributes that Bing supports.

Note

The message must specify the elements in the order defined in the Transaction XSD (or as shown in the reference).

The top-level Transaction element

Price feeds contain a single, top-level Transaction element.

<Transaction timestamp="2017-05-25T20:44:56-04:00" id="de0be689-d094-406e-
8027-724309deb373">

You must specify the timestamp and id attributes.

The timestamp attribute should identify the time that you submit the message. Bing uses the time stamp to ensure that it processes only the latest itineraries. For example, if Bing processes a message with a time stamp of 14:10 and then processes a message with a time stamp of 14:09, Bing only processes the itineraries in the 14:09 message that were not included in the 14:10 message.

The id attribute is a user-defined ID that uniquely identifies the message to the advertiser. The advertiser uses the ID to identify the message in the list of property feed status reports.

Specifying the list of itineraries

The Transaction element contains a list of Result elements, one for each itinerary it defines. The message should include only new itineraries or those that have changed.

The following shows a Result element that specifies the required child elements.

  <Result>
    <Property>13579</Property>
    <Checkin>2017-06-10</Checkin>
    <Nights>2</Nights>
    <Baserate currency="USD">159.99</Baserate>
    <Tax currency="USD">20.00</Tax>
    <OtherFees currency="USD">4.00</OtherFees>
  </Result>

The Property ID must match the ID of a property in your property feed file. The Checkin date must be within the 90-day advanced booking window, and Nights must be in the range 1 through 14.

The Baserate specifies the cost of the entire length of stay and not the nightly room rate.

If you allow five days advanced booking and stays of up to three-nights, your message would contain 15 Result elements. The following example shows one day's worth of itineraries.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Transaction timestamp="2017-05-25T20:44:56-04:00" id="de0be689-d094-406e-
8027-724309deb373">
  <Result>
    <Property>13579</Property>
    <Checkin>2017-05-26</Checkin>
    <Nights>1</Nights>
    <Baserate currency="USD">159.99</Baserate>
    <Tax currency="USD">20.00</Tax>
    <OtherFees currency="USD">4.00</OtherFees>
    <AllowablePointsOfSale>
      <PointOfSale id="mobile"/>
      <PointOfSale id="desktop"/>
    </AllowablePointsOfSale>
  </Result>
  <Result>
    <Property>13579</Property>
    <Checkin>2017-05-26</Checkin>
    <Nights>2</Nights>
    <Baserate currency="USD">159.99</Baserate>
    <Tax currency="USD">20.00</Tax>
    <OtherFees currency="USD">4.00</OtherFees>
    <AllowablePointsOfSale>
      <PointOfSale id="mobile"/>
      <PointOfSale id="desktop"/>
    </AllowablePointsOfSale>
  </Result>
  <Result>
    <Property>13579</Property>
    <Checkin>2017-05-26</Checkin>
    <Nights>3</Nights>
    <Baserate currency="USD">159.99</Baserate>
    <Tax currency="USD">20.00</Tax>
    <OtherFees currency="USD">4.00</OtherFees>
    <AllowablePointsOfSale>
      <PointOfSale id="mobile"/>
      <PointOfSale id="desktop"/>
    </AllowablePointsOfSale>
  </Result>
</Transaction>

After defining the 15 itineraries, each subsequent message would include only those itineraries that changed. For example, pricing or availability changes.

Removing itineraries

To remove an itinerary, set its Baserate, Tax, and OtherFees elements to -1.00. Bing automatically removes itineraries with check in dates that have past.

Using the optional Result elements

The following shows a Result element that includes the optional child elements.

  <Result>
    <Property>13579</Property>
    <Checkin>2017-05-26</Checkin>
    <Nights>2</Nights>
    <Baserate currency="USD">159.99</Baserate>
    <Tax currency="USD">20.00</Tax>
    <OtherFees currency="USD">4.00</OtherFees>
    <ExpirationTimestamp>2017-05-28T09:00:34Z</ExpirationTimestamp>
    <ChargeCurrency>deposit</ChargeCurrency>
    <Custom1>summer2017</Custom1>
    <AllowablePointsOfSale>
      <PointOfSale id="mobile"/>
      <PointOfSale id="desktop"/>
    </AllowablePointsOfSale>
  </Result>

Use ExpirationTimestamp to specify an expiry date for the itinerary. For example, in Case 1, the itinerary is served.

Case 1:

Today = 3/16/2018
CheckInDate = 4/1/2018
ExpirationTimestamp = 3/20/2018

But in Case 2, the itinerary is not served.

Case 2:

Today = 3/21/2018
CheckInDate = 4/1/2018
ExpirationTime = 3/20/2018

Use the ChargeCurrency element to specify when the user is charged for the booking. By default, the user pays when they book (this is the Web option). This example uses Deposit, which asks the user to pay a portion at booking and the remainder later (for example, when they check out).

Use one or more of the five Custom elements to provide substitution values for dynamic parameters in a point of sale (POS) URL. For example, if the POS URL is https://www.partnerdomain.com?promo=(CUSTOM1) and Custom1 is set to summer2017, the POS URL that Bing uses is https://www.partnerdomain.com?promo=summer2017. For more information, see Using Dynamic Query Parameters.

The sum of all Custom[1-5] values is limited to a maximum of 1,000 characters, but keep in mind that the practical limit may be less given the maximum length of a URL.

Use the AllowablePointsOfSale element to specify specific POS URLs that user's can use for booking. By default, the user may use any POS in the partner's Landing pages feed file. The id attribute must match a POS in the feed file.

Next steps

Before sending Price feeds, make sure your property feed file and Landing pages file are up to date. To update these files, contact your TAM. After the TAM imports the data into Bing, you may begin sending Price feeds. Price feeds sent before the data is imported will fail.

Validate the Price feed before sending it to Bing. For information, see Validating your Price feed.

For information about sending Bing your Price feed, see Pushing Price feeds to Bing or Having Bing Pull Price feeds.

For information about adding room bundles to your itineraries, see Creating a metadata Price feed and Using Room Bundles.