A travel agency integration with GDS travel APIs is typically a journey of 10 months to a year, from the first intake form to a live production environment. As an Authorized Sabre Developer, we built on top of them enough times to know that firsthand.
However, it’s totally feasible to reduce this timeframe by significantly speeding up the integration code development. For instance, by combining AI, a knowledge graph platform, and domain expertise, the AltexSoft engineering team cuts the integration with Sabre to 2-4 weeks (depending on specifics), with a 7x reduction in bug rate. In this article, we’ll dive deep into how exactly GDS integration timelines can be compressed.
How to accelerate GDS integration
What makes GDS integrations long and tricky
For OTAs and TMCs, GDS API integration is a reliable way to gain access to a broad range of airline, hotel, and car rental content. The business value is obvious, but connecting to such a complex and extensive platform requires significant resources.
Business negotiations are intensive
Before you can start integrating with GDS APIs, you must complete a business onboarding process that typically takes several months. This includes proving your legal business status, providing the required industry accreditations (such as ARC or IATA, or partnership with a consolidator), submitting an intake form, negotiating the APIs and geographic markets you need, and signing a commercial agreement covering pricing, usage, and legal terms. Only after the contract is finalized does the GDS grant access to its account management portal and API environment.
Read more about it in our experience-based piece on Sabre API Integration.
Working across two protocols has its complications
A GDS’s developer ecosystem offers tens or hundreds of APIs, both SOAP and REST (in case of Sabre, for instance, it’s 239 SOAP against 191 REST APIs). REST is the more modern, but it doesn't cover every workflow, so most serious integrations end up working across both.
Besides being less developer-friendly, SOAP can create a second-order problem: for example, some Sabre SOAP APIs are very similar. And if you use AI coding tools, a large language model can easily pick the wrong API to integrate with (that’s what happened to our team, but human developers caught the mistake in time).
The booking flow is more complex than it looks
A successful integration depends on calling the right API endpoints in the correct order. Booking, pricing, ticketing, payment, and post-booking operations form a sequence in which each step affects the next.
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