Quickbook API

• Building the locations array
• Pre-Booking vs ASAP
• Date Time Handling
• Passenger and courier service types
• Multi-account

Building the locations array

locations can either be an “Address” or an “Airport” as specified by the “source” field. Either way, they always need to contain lat/long coordinates in addition to the address information.

1. Address

"locations": [
  {
    "source": "Address",
    "street_address": "Barbican Centre, 10 Silk St",
    "town": "London",
    "postcode": "EC2Y 8DS",
    "country": "GB",
    "lat": 51.520024,
    "long": -0.092447,
    "notes": "Wait before the car park and taxis entrance",
    "contact": {
      "name": "John Doe",
      "mobile": "07123456789",
      "email": "john.doe@example.com"
    }
  },
  ...
]

• street_address is used for all the part of the address that isn’t the Town, Postcode, or Country
• The full address will be built from these parts as follows: street_address + town + postcode + country
  • So the above example will become: Barbican Centre, 10 Silk St, London, EC2Y 8DS, GB

2. Airport

{
      "source": "Airport",
      "street_address": "London Heathrow Airport",
      "lat": 51.47138888,
      "long": -0.45277777,
      "airport": {
        "iata": "LHR",
        "terminal": "2",
        "flight_number": "BA714"
        "arrival_from": "LAX"
      }
}

• Use Airport as the value for the source element
• Use this for airport locations
• When doing pre-book airport pickups, this information should be used in conjunction with a flight number

(1) flight_number: while not mandatory, it is highly recommended that you provide it if possible, as it allows our systems to get terminal/arrival_from informational automatically, plus allows us to track flights and adjust pickup times accordingly.

(2) terminal: while technically an optional field, it should be considered mandatory for airports with multiple terminals. (or as noted above, you can provide the flight number and we can look up the terminal information)

(3) arrival_from: some terminals have very different collection points depending on whether the flight is international or domestic, so knowing where the flight is coming from is very useful. (or even better, as noted above, just provide the flight number, and we can look up the details for you).

Legacy Addresses

In the past instead of street_address, a combination of address and name was used to form street addresses. This led to much confusion as the address field was discarded, and name required the full street address, not just a building name: which resulting in many malformed addresses missing important information.

Support for the legacy format is retained for partners already using it, but all new integrations should use the new format, and we advise existing partners to move to the new format to improve your code maintainability.

Pre-Booking vs ASAP

Generally, it's clear that if you want to make a booking for next week, you use a pre-book (providing pickupdt in the price quote/booking), and if you want the pickup as soon as possible, it's an ASAP (where you don't provide pickup_dt in the price quote/booking.

Things are more complicated when you want to make a pre-booking for a time shortly in the future, say in an hour's time. The strict rule here is that you can only make pre-bookings for beyond the earliest ASAP pickup, which you determine using /quote/time/.

If you try to make a pre-book for an earlier time than the earliest available pre-book, the booking will automatically be converted into an ASAP booking.

Date Time Handling

Date and time should be posted using the following ISO-8601 format.

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss:+hh:mm

Example: 2016-06-06T12:00:00+01:

Example: 2016-06-06T12:00:00+01:00

Date and time should be posted in LOCAL time.

You can post either with or without determinate the offset.

Dates and times will NOT be converted to timezones and offsets are currently not validated.

Passenger and courier service types

Depending on the commercial contract you have with us, some services will not be available on your account(s).

For passenger bookings, the available services are:

For courier bookings, example services are:

Multi-account

Some partners can have more than one account which means one main account and multiple linked-accounts (multi-account).

To create a booking using the multi-account option:

• The Authorization header (AL client_id:client_secret) should belong to the main account
• The payment_method should be MultiAccount
• The account.number should contain the number of the account to be booked on

{
  "payment_method" : "MultiAccount",
  "account" : {
    "number" : "123456"
  },
  "locations" : [{
  "address" : "35-37 William Road",
  ...
}