Overview

You are an OTA (online travel agency) or other travel media/platform and want to use show review content to your visitors or even integrate it more deeply (e.g. hotel search, filters etc.)?

Great, this is the right guide for you. Here is a quick summary of the steps required for implementation:

1. First you need to clarify how the property mapping is done. You need to know which property ID in your database corresponds to our Olery ID.
2. Now think about how you want to use the data. If you simply want to display some review content for each property without much work, then you can make use of our OTA Widget code, checkout a the live demo.
3. All review data needs to be served from a cache on your side. Please set one up. This avoid leakage of your Olery API token in our website.
4. Make scheduled or continuous requests to the Olery Widget API endpoint to fill and update your cache.

Steps

1. Property Mapping

For the mapping options, please see Mapping. You need to have the Olery ID (property ID) ready in your database. All requests to the Olery API require this ID.

2. Data & Concept

The API will provide you with aggregated data based on online guest reviews from various sources.

Generally, you get:

• ratings by categories (e.g. cleanliness)
• ratings by guest country
• ratings by guest composition (e.g. families)
• mentions (extracted from the reviews text) by topic (e.g. swimming pool)
• English textual summary based on the above data
• nearby attractions and their ratings

Check out the demo widget, it will help you to understand the data points.

If you want to use the demo as a foundation of your implementation, you are free to use the code. The above example uses a component-based UI library written in JS called RiotJS to get the data from an API endpoint and to transform it into HTML components.

3. Caching

Because your apps might have a lot of visitors/users, all review data needs to be loaded from your side, for this reason, you need to prepare a specific url to provide this cached data.

Make sure your frontend is only using your cached data and not the Olery API. Otherwise, you will be rate limited sooner or later. Also, our contracts do not allow you reveal the Olery API token to 3rd parties.

If you use the code of the demo, you will find a ota_widget.api object in the js code to construct the request to the Olery API. Make sure to change this, so it gets the data from your cache instead.

4. Updating the cache

Now that your app gets the data from your cache, it just needs to be filled. For this make a request to the widget endpoint for every hotel.

There request will look something like this: https://agora.olery.com/v3/companies/123/review_widget?auth_token=XXX

In the response you find a field updated_at, which is a timestamp of when we cached the data (we also need to cache). It is useful to save it, so you can check against it when updating.

To update your cache we suggest a weekly schedule which goes through all properties and updates if there is a more recent version by comparing the updated_at values.

At the moment, we update the cache approximately every 30 days, but we plan to make this more frequent.