Can I try out your flight booking API with test bookings before I start selling real tickets?

Yes, in nearly all cases you can. We give you test credentials that point your site at a test environment, where a search, a booking and a cancellation all run from start to finish without a real ticket being issued and without any money moving. This lets your developer check that your site handles the responses properly, and it lets you and your staff click through the booking screens the way a customer would, so you find the awkward bits before a paying customer does.

The main thing to expect is that test results are not real market data. Many test environments only return flights for a small set of sample routes and dates, so the times, airlines and fares you see may look thin or strange. That is normal and not a sign of a problem. What matters in testing is the behaviour, so work through a search, a successful booking, a cancellation, and deliberately broken cases like a wrong date or an incomplete passenger name, and see that your site shows a sensible message each time.

Where it gets less tidy depends on the supplier and the airline. Some content has no test environment at all, so the only way to prove it is a live booking that you void or cancel straight away, which can carry an airline charge. Extras such as seats, bags and special requests often do not respond properly in test even though they work live. Some suppliers also ask you to pass a short review of your booking flow before they hand over live credentials, so allow time for that.

Before you begin, write down the handful of real scenarios your agents deal with every week and ask us which of those can be tested fully and which will only behave correctly once you are live.