Any Laterooms gurus?

[monaghan]

I've pinged an email to the affiliate support but got an out of office reply, so was wondering if anyone has done much with the XML query system.

I can pull back a list of hotels in my desired county and filter this down to selected towns, however, when comparing this with the CSV from the affiliate portal, half of my hotels are missing from the XML reply.

For my XML query, I'm using rtype=5 and pulling a list to filter by hotel_city to get my desired hotels.

To add further to the confusion, if I query the LR site, I get further hotels that are not in the CSV or the XML.

Any clues or do I need to wait for the affiliate team to come back off holiday?

 

[retired_member33]

I have a contact over at the affiliate team with whom I spoke this afternoon.

Send me a pm with your email and I will forward his details

 

[accelerator]

There is user ribble-valley (might be without hyphen) here who I know works with LateRooms XML so he might be able to help.

Rgds

 

[chippyb]

easiest answer i can give you after i found out from people on here, dont use the xml, use the csv file and a database, trust me the xml is so slow, and on the laterooms site when you search you dont just get hotels from that area, if you go through them all you will see they add other towns as well.

Ryan

 

[monaghan]

The XML is fast from here and allows much more flexibility. I can't see any way other than pulling the whole database as csv. Naturally, the final site will cache the XML data (except for any real-time room availability queries)

I just found a &showall=true for the xml query so the XML now matches the CSV, however, still getting more on the LR search than I get in the XML or CSV

 

[chippyb]

Remember its not you you have to worry about, its veryone that visits your site, and not everyone has fast broadband yet so could be slow for some people which will just make them turn away before even looking,
I dont think you will unless you do the search for your area plus surrounding areas as I think thats what the laterooms site does,

 

[monaghan]

As suggested, a filtered XML query on a cron job is very fast, much faster than processing the whole CSV. If I was wanting to provide details for a very large number of hotels, then perhaps a full CSV would be OK, but for my purposes the XML is just fine as I'm only focussing on 1 town and surrounding area.

 

[AssetDomains]

I'm sure I read somewhere but can't seem to find it now that there are a small number of hotels exclusive to the laterooms site only.

The &showall=true is quite interesting maybe time for a new update.

 

[monaghan]

Seems odd that they would want to hide hotels from affiliates, unless certain hotels can opt-out, but I'd have thought they would be keen to get as many potentially empty rooms filled as possible.

 

[fresh79]

I have found that the rtype=4 keyword query does not select all the hotels that the csv file has, I learnt to live with it, &showall=true sound very interesting.
Also laterooms are moving to awin very soon so perhaps live csv feeds may be on the horizon?