Can I book several rooms at once for a group travelling together through your hotel booking API?

Yes, in most cases you can book more than one room in a single booking. When you search, you tell the system how many rooms you need and how many adults and children are staying in each one, and the results come back priced for that whole combination rather than for one room at a time. That means you can quote a family or a small group in one go instead of running the same search over and over.

There is a limit, though, and it comes from the supplier rather than from us. Most hotel suppliers only allow a small number of rooms on one booking, so if your group is larger than that you will need to make two or three separate bookings for the same hotel. Availability is checked again each time, so the second booking is not guaranteed to come back at the same rate as the first, and occasionally the rooms you wanted have gone by then. Some special rate plans also only allow a single room per booking, so they simply will not appear in a multi room search.

You will usually need to give guest names for each room, and any request you add applies to the room you attach it to. It is also worth knowing that cancellation terms normally apply room by room, so cancelling one room does not automatically free you from the others. Genuine large groups, where you want a block of rooms held and invoiced together, are generally handled by the hotel or chain group desk and sit outside what any hotel API will do.

Before you quote a group, run a test search for the number of rooms you expect and see how many the supplier will accept in one booking, and read the cancellation terms shown for each room so you know exactly what you are committing your customer to.