Are you offering activities, guided tours, holiday rentals or any other bookable product online? To handle bookings, payments and customer confirmations, you will inevitably need to rely on technology — unless you plan to sit in front of your screen with your phone and card reader around the clock!
There are really only two ways to handle online bookings: you can either use a Widget or turn to an API. These are two concepts that aren't necessarily easy to grasp if you're unfamiliar with the complex world of online reservations. But don't worry — we'll explain everything!
What is the difference between a Widget and an API?
A Widget is a small graphical element placed somewhere on your website that calls on an external booking system. The Widget then displays the booking module in the designated spot on your site.An API, on the other hand, is invisible to your site's visitors. It is used solely to exchange information between your website and the booking system. The booking itself must then take place within a booking module that you build yourself.
An example? Imagine your website is a restaurant and your visitors are customers walking through the door. The Widget would be the menu, while the API would be the order placed by your customers and sent directly to your kitchen.
One thing to bear in mind: a Widget must always be connected to an API in order to work, because the website calls the API, which checks the database to see whether the booking is available and, if so, confirms the purchase. All of this happens in a matter of milliseconds, of course! Conversely, an API cannot function on its own: it needs a shell to present it on your site, but that shell doesn't have to be a Widget.
Widgets don't exist solely for booking systems. You can, for example, use Widgets to display today's weather, a calendar, posts from your social media accounts or customer reviews of your products. They come in all shapes and sizes!
Why choose a booking Widget?
If your website exists purely to promote your guided tours or activities, a booking Widget will be more than sufficient. The first advantage of a widget is that it can be set up quickly and easily in just a few clicks. It's simply a small line of code to insert wherever you want the booking module to appear on your site.You therefore don't need any particular technical skills to install a Widget. You just need to know how to copy and paste into your website pages. On WordPress, the process is even more straightforward: simply copy and paste the Widget code into a "Code" block. That's all there is to it!
The booking Widget we offer on Explorates also has the advantage of being customisable. You can fine-tune the primary colour by entering the exact colour reference used on your site. Your Widget will then be linked to your Explorates account to check availability and pricing for each of your products, via our API. Simple, practical and effective!
Why choose an API for your bookings?
An API-based booking solution is aimed at businesses that have a team capable of integrating an API into their website. An API does require getting under the bonnet, so to speak, in order to establish the necessary connections with the database. You will need to set up what are known as API routes — the entry points leading to the database.The work is more complex than installing a Widget, but the result is a fully customised booking system, both in terms of content and appearance. The API handles the real-time exchange of data between the website and the booking system. It gives you complete control over every aspect of the transaction — from the sales funnel and the messages displayed throughout the purchase journey to the design of each individual element.
The API therefore offers far more possibilities! And the Explorates API is all the more advantageous because it is built on the OCTO standard. This internationally deployed standard makes it possible to standardise the exchange of information during tourism booking operations. A well-defined framework that saves a great deal of time as API integrations accumulate!
Explorates allows you to connect directly to our API through an on-request offering reserved for businesses. Feel free to contact us for more information.
