This article hopes to give you some insight into the differences when comparing supplier results via an API connection (how we connect to your suppliers) vs the results they display on their portal, along with why you are never likely to see the same results on both.
API connections are built for speed and have been optimised in order to get the best results on screen to your customers in the fastest possible time.
Below are the most common reasons why you may not see the same results via the API connection as you do on the supplier portal/website:
Number of results & distance from search point
With a lot of API connections, we can only search by property ids and the APIs have a limit on how many properties we can search at once (eg. 250), so when you are searching all star ratings, particularly in a large area such as Dubai which has a high concentration of properties in a small area, there are limits on how many results we can get to return. Normally we take the max number we can search from the distance from the point of the search (centre point), but to try and maximise the search area, we do randomise this when searching large areas to try and get a good spread over the area, however this does mean you may not get all the properties you are expecting.
Another issue with searching by property lists is that we have no knowledge of what properties are available and so we could be performing a search for 250 properties where only 100 are available. Where supported by suppliers, we try and search by geographical location as that then ensures we get up to the maximum number of results that are actually available in the location, rather than sending in properties that we do not know are available.
Please note that we are limited by the suppliers API and what they support when searching.
Speed of results (particularly third party suppliers)
A lot of suppliers now search lots of third parties, as well as their own stock/availability. Connecting to additional third parties brings with it more results, but also slows down their API from returning results. In these cases, either the supplier will have a timeout settings or we will.
If your timeout setting is set too low (we recommend anywhere between 15 and 25 seconds to return a good set of results, depending on your suppliers) then you will not receive as many results as the supplier portal/website. Some suppliers (eg. Ratehawk) have a portal that will just keep on searching in the background until they have all results from all their third-parties, however their API has a set limit (normally 12-15 seconds) and returns what it has in that time.
Special/restricted rates
Most supplier portals/websites have rates available that they cannot sell on their API's as they are a closed user group behind a login they control. When it comes to an API, they cannot control how their product is being sold (this is normally a restriction in place by their hotel providers) and so these rates are not available on their API product when they are available on the supplier website/portal.
Some suppliers may have an agreement where you can obtain "some" of these rates by agreeing that you are selling their content to a closed user group (B2B) - however, you need to speak to your suppliers about this as they may require you to sign/agree to additional terms and you may still not be able to retrieve all of these rates via their API.
Deduping
Some suppliers (eg. Intuitive) dedupe results and return only the cheapest of each property on their API before we even get the results. You also have the ability to enable/disable deduping in your application settings depending on who is searching and, if enabled, you should only see the single cheapeast property in your results rather than all the results for a single property from all of your suppliers.
