The WorldMate Developers API - Overview

Your customers have a lot to tell you about their trips but have been waiting for a convenient way to do so. Well, the wait is over. Now they can send you precise details of their trips—what flights they are taking, in which hotel they are staying, where they are planning to eat, etc.—with a simple click of a button. All you have to do is integrate with the WorldMate API, oh, and abide by our rules.

What is the WorldMate API?

The WorldMate API is a conduit to relay your customers’ travel confirmation emails to our parsing engine which will process the incoming emails, extract all the key details, send those details back to you, and then delete the original incoming email from our system. That’s right—the end-users don’t need to create a WorldMate account and we will not market to them. After all, they are your customers not ours.

To be more precise- the parsing process turns semi-structured travel confirmation emails into fully structured travel items in a computer readable format.

It turns out that there is no industry standard for travel confirmation emails and as a result each airline, hotelier, and online travel agent uses its own system to produce these confirmations. This means that there are dozens of thousands of different confirmation email formats with which to contend.

Which confirmation emails are covered?

WorldMate has been analyzing millions of confirmation emails and our parsing engine can now recognize and successfully parse emails from over 1300 different sources worldwide in over 15 languages. A full list of supported providers is here. A brief summary:

• 155 Airlines
• 240 Hotel Chains
• 22 Car Rental Agencies
• 620 Leisure and Corporate Travel Agencies
• 12 Rail Systems
• and even OpenTable and TicketMaster

The data collected from these emails includes:

• Traveler’s name and email address
• Frequent flier/loyalty account number & level (e.g. Platinum, Gold, Silver, etc.)
• Flight #s, PNRs/confirmation numbers, price paid, departure & arrival dates, airport & hotel addresses/geocodes, phone numbers, etc.

The complete list of what details are parsed from the confirmation emails is detailed in the API documentation once you create your developer account.

So, what can I do with the data?

The applications are only limited by your imagination. Here’s a few ideas for inspiration:

• Advise your customer if he can get a better flight or hotel deal
• Build detailed user profiles based on their past trips to personalize your site/app when your customer visits
• Piece together mobile itineraries
• Trigger serendipitous introductions when two or more customers are traveling to the same destination
• Communicate with your customers if their flight is cancelled or there is a natural disaster
• Generate expense reports

How does WorldMate get my customers’ confirmation emails?

All you need to do is create an email account (e.g. trips@developer.com) and have your customers forward their confirmation emails to this account. Next, have your mail server redirect those incoming emails to a dedicated WorldMate mailbox (e.g. bf7e0cd3-286a-4d41-9a6e-f5817f1b133e@api.worldmate.com).

How does WorldMate send back the parsed data to me?

There are two options for this. You can choose either or both:

Or in a more visual way:

Can I try this out without having to sign up?

Sure, send a travel confirmation email to apidemo@worldmate.com and we’ll send back the parsed response within seconds. For this trial, the response will be emailed back to the address from which you send us the sample. Please note, that you will be limited to 5 tests—that should be enough for you to get an idea of the service.

Ok, I’m sold. Where can I get more info and how much is this going to cost me?

Getting started is free. In fact, you can continue to use the API for free as long as you stay below these usage limits.

Click here for more information and to register your developer account.