Changing the Game in Hospitality Integrations

We’re open, seriously open. That’s the slogan that we at Oracle Hospitality have been reciting over the past few months to describe the “open architecture” that soon will define our products, especially OPERA Cloud.

Using the previous analogy, streaming API is a technology that enables “push” notifications, which means users of our APIs won’t have to constantly pull our API for events. Instead, this new “push” technology enables users of our streaming API to be notified automatically in real time whenever an event occurs in OPERA Cloud. For hoteliers, its benefits can be used in countless scenarios to enhance guest service and improve operations—from check-in and checkout to updating reservations to tracking housekeeping changes.

What is OHIP?

OHIP is our next-generation integration solution, which centralizes, consolidates, and streamlines all our interface capabilities and related processes into a single and unified platform.

It will allow users an unprecedented self-service experience, from discovering our rich set of Hospitality REST APIs to adopting them in customer or partner applications to publishing their usage in our cloud marketplace. The benefits for all are quite clear: We are making it simpler, quicker, and less expensive to integrate with Oracle Hospitality Cloud applications.

Technical overview

OHIP is a cloud-native solution designed from the ground up to help our hospitality customers and partners meet not just immediate marketplace demands but emerging ones, too. The entire platform runs in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), most specifically in Kubernetes, as fully stateless and independently deployable microservices. This modern architecture enables OHIP and its key components, such as the Developer Portal and API Gateways (runtime component responsible for providing secure and rapid access to our hospitality APIs), to be highly scalable and capable of securely handling high levels of throughput.

The image illustrates common integrations and messages that are expected of a property management system (PMS) with systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Customer Experience (CX), Central Reservation Systems (CRM) and Distribution.

In addition, OHIP uses a third-generation API Platform, namely Oracle API Platform Cloud Service and Apiary, along with many other Oracle Cloud services, to deliver a rich and responsive, self-service developer experience. The solution is modular and flexible, meaning new features can be released on demand, eliminating long release cycles.

Available features

This release of OHIP offers the following features:

A partner-focused portal allowing developers to:

• Search our hospitality APIs through a responsive user interface
• Read detailed API documentation through an interactive page enabled with our Apiary embed capability
• Discover the different resources available in an API, including visualization of request/response schemas, sample payloads, and client-code generation in multiple languages, such as Java, JavaScript, Python and Go
• Interact with Oracle Apiary’s mock and debugging servers
• Register and manage applications, including issuing (or re-issuing) of Application Keys—required when accessing OPERA environments via API calls
• Subscribe applications to use hospitality APIs
• Manage and visualize applications metadata such as contact details, Application Keys, and which APIs an application is subscribed to

The image illustrates the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) API documentation page displayed in a laptop as well as a smart phone.

The following API capabilities also will be available:

• OPERA Cloud Activity API: resources that expose Sales Activity functionality of OPERA Cloud. Activities provide an account management capability for overseeing daily tasks such as appointments, sales calls and contact follow-up. In this release, we’re making available 9 operations that will allow users to create, get, update, delete, and complete activities.
• OPERA Cloud Back Office Operations API: resources that expose Back Office Operations functionality of OPERA Cloud. This is typically referred to as ‘End of Day’ functionality; it provides capabilities to: close and balance each day's business activities, reconcile guest folios, and process credit-card transactions. In this release, we’re making available one operation that permits getting end-of-day business date for a property.
• OPERA Cloud Customer Relationship Management API: resources that expose Profile Management functionality of OPERA Cloud. There are different types of profiles in OPERA Cloud, including Guest, Company, Travel Agent, Source, Group, and Contact. A profile can store and display a wide range of information about the guest, company, travel agent etc. In this release, 15 operations will allow users to: create and get company and guest profiles, update profiles, forget or delete profiles, merge profiles, and get profiles by their external ID—an ID assigned by a third-party system connected to OPERA Cloud.
• OPERA Cloud Front Desk Master Data Management API: resources that expose Master Data Configuration for Front Office Operations in OPERA Cloud. One operation will allow fetching of past and future exchange rates.
• OPERA Cloud Housekeeping Service API: resources that expose Housekeeping functionality of OPERA Cloud. Housekeeping enables scheduling of daily room cleaning, maintenance, and housekeeping staff activities. It provides information about room status, out of order/out of service rooms, and forecasting. In this release, two operations will be available: one to access a housekeeping overview—a summary of the status of all rooms—and another to update room status.
• OPERA Cloud Integration Processor AP: resources that expose functionality to fetch Business Events generated in OPERA Cloud. Two operations retrieve business events for one or multiple hotels.
• OPERA Cloud List of Values Management API: resources that expose List of Value (LOV) functionality of OPERA Cloud. A List of Values in OPERA Cloud can be configured by a property. Then by using this API, users can retrieve all configured codes. For example, Titles is a configurable LOV. A hotel can specify the titles they wish to use, and by fetching the LOV for title, codes that are configured for a property can be viewed. We’re making available 442 operations to get various lists of values.
• OPERA Cloud Price Availability Rate Async API: resources that expose functionality to asynchronously bulk-process large sets of Price and Rate Availability data in OPERA Cloud. Three operations will allow asynchronous processing of large sets of price, availability, and rate restrictions data. This API also allows the retrieval (polling) of the statuses of the jobs created to process the batches.
• OPERA Cloud Reservation API (only for non-production): resources that expose Reservations related functionality of OPERA Cloud, such as creating and updating reservations. Reservations are a central feature of OPERA Cloud. As a key source of information, the reservation specifies a guest's arrival date, departure date, room type, rate, packages, and many other details. It is also a gateway to dozens of other functions that contribute to the guest's experience. Eleven operations allow users to create, get, update, cancel and reinstate a reservation, link and unlink reservations, validate reservation changes, mark a reservation as pre-registered, and revert a pre-registration.
• OPERA Cloud Reservation Async API: resources that expose functionality to asynchronously process Reservation data in OPERA Cloud. Three operations will allow: starting a job to get a daily summary of reservations at a property, polling for the status of the job, and retrieving the job results.
• OAuth API: a single resource that can be used to obtain JWT tokens based on Resource Owner Password OAuth grant.

I also want to highlight that under this new model, a partner who gains OHIP access—just like any other Oracle Hospitality customer—will get direct access to Oracle Support

Accessing OHIP

In this initial release, we will only offer OHIP via our Direct Sales team. For further information, please send us an email to hospitality_apis_ww_group@oracle.com. However, we’re working diligently towards including OHIP in shop.oracle.com such as partners can register to obtain OHIP.

A ‘thank you’ to our pioneers

Launching OHIP was no simple feat, and it would have been impossible without the help of our customers and partners. More than 150 companies have participated in our early-adopter program, dedicating resources, participating in surveys and other activities, and conducting early testing. For their time and effort providing us with invaluable feedback, I am grateful, and on behalf of Oracle Hospitality, I offer my sincere thanks.

Committing to an “open architecture” also means listening more and building a sense of community. We are making it our foremost priority to maintain an open, friendly, and continuous dialogue with all the actors—including customers, partners, and guests—who share this new hospitality platform ecosystem with us.

What’s next?

This initial general release of OHIP marks an important milestone, but there is so many more to come. We’re following an incredible roadmap that’ll lead us to an array of features, and in our next release, we’re aiming to unveil capabilities that will further enrich the user experience of the developer portal, expand the business capabilities offered by our REST APIs, and enable SSO with OPERA Cloud and OPERA 5 OCI (hosted)—just to name a few.

Oracle Hospitality brings over 40 years of experience in providing technology solutions to independent hoteliers, global and regional chains, gaming, and cruise lines. Our cloud-based, mobile-enabled solutions for property management, point-of-sale, distribution, and reporting and analytics lower IT costs and maximize business agility. Oracle Hospitality’s OPERA is recognized globally as the leading property management platform and offers open APIs to serve as a platform for industry innovation.