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Welcome to Travel Buddy
In this episode of the Travel Buddy podcast, hosted by Switchfly, Mark Smith, Senior Director of Engineering at Switchfly, joins Ian to discuss the importance of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in the travel industry. The conversation highlights how APIs are crucial for digital travel, enabling travel technology companies to provide products like flights, hotels, and car rentals to consumers efficiently.
Key points discussed include:
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APIs and Dynamic Packaging: Switchfly utilizes APIs to offer dynamic packaging, allowing users to book hotels, cars, and flights in real time with various business rules, markups, and commissions. This dynamic inventory management is essential for providing accurate and timely travel options.
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Integration and Implementation: For businesses looking to integrate Switchfly’s services, APIs facilitate the authentication process and enable seamless communication between different systems. The importance of having robust documentation and simple APIs for easy implementation was emphasized.
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Types of APIs: Mark explains the different types of APIs, including web APIs, libraries, and interfaces, as well as the common data formats like XML and JSON used in the travel industry.
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Security: Security in API interactions, especially concerning payment gateways, is a priority for Switchfly. Ensuring secure communication between servers and APIs is crucial to protect sensitive data.
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Impact on Innovation: APIs drive innovation and business efficiency by allowing different systems to communicate and share data seamlessly. The rise of AI and machine learning further enhances the potential of APIs, enabling more personalized and efficient travel solutions.
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Historical Context and Future of APIs: Mark touches on the evolution of APIs from early interfaces to the current web-based APIs and their future with generative AI, potentially transforming how users interact with travel services.
The podcast also delves into practical examples of API usage in everyday technology, such as social media and payment systems, and discusses the potential for AI to revolutionize travel booking by making the process more intuitive and automated.
The episode concludes with Mark sharing his favorite travel destination, the Isle of Skye in Scotland, and expressing his enjoyment of the fascinating and complex domain of travel technology.
Transcript
Why are APIs is so important? I think they’re actually important to digital travel all around, right? Travel technology companies who are providing Travel products, flights, hotels, car, through APIs to other people who are going to consume them. So that’s the method that they are selling their products. The only method is through APIs. And, one of the crown jewels that Switchfly has from just why do we exist is dynamic packaging. And that’s the ability to do a package booking, right? hotel, car, air, at the same time, In real time with different business rules, markup, commissions, et cetera.
It means that we’re able to connect to all these different sources of this inventory. Real time, whenever you make a search we take all of these different Travel products from different companies by communicating with them through their A.
- I. S. hotel chain one. You’ve got a hotel chain to you have the same hotel. You guys are both. Sending it to us, you have different ways of thinking about that hotel, but we internally genericize that hotel, think of it as a switch fly hotel, and then we can think about the two different prices and rooms that you sent, and we can think about it all generically and do markups and commissions and discounts and yada, yada, yada to it. And finally, if needed dynamically package it with a flight. And that is a powerful thing in our digital travel industry. And it’s one of the things that Switchslide does very well. So without all this APIs, that wouldn’t really exist for us. And, I don’t actually think we would exist as a business.
📍 📍 📍 Welcome to Travel Buddy, presented by Switchfly. In this podcast, we talk about all things travel, rewards, and loyalty. Let’s get to it.
📍 📍 📍 📍 📍 📍 Hello, and welcome to episode seven of the travel buddy podcast today is a little bit different because instead of James We have Mark Smith. So we have Ian as usual, and we have Mark Smith, who’s a senior director of engineering at SwitchFly. And he is going to talk to us today about APIs. And this may sound like a little bit of a technical conversation.
I hope it is anyway, you’re the technology expert, but, there’s a very important point of why APIs are important for SwitchFly and all the pieces that make up the platform and the benefits to travelers and to your customers in general. So I’ll let Ian take it away from here, but I’m excited to hear about why APIs are so important to switch by.
Yeah, thanks, Brandon. so on here, we talk a lot about travel and the travel industry, right? Either, directly talking about the recommendations for how to book travel or, Just industry trends and views, as a whole. So we wanted to get a little more technical with this one. obviously switch fly is a, software platform, that user, that our customers integrate into their own loyalty and rewards programs, that they either come with or, having built or, whatever.
I wanted to grab Mark. Mark’s probably one of the smartest people here. Is has a very deep understanding of the platform and can talk to us a little bit about, how the platform would integrate with somebody’s system and then, and APIs overall as well. Mark, thanks for hopping in here today and helping us out.
so what, are APIs exactly and, how, how do you use them? How are they important? why do we use them? All that good stuff.
Sure. first off, Ian, thank you. Thank you for having me on the show. Excited to be here. APIs. I think the official definition of them is application programming interface. it’s not new. It’s been around for a long time. morphed from just, maybe what you would pass around internally as a, library on a, disc to web, APIs that we, all know and love and consume today. but they are very important for SwitchFly and for our customers. They’re very important too. we also have a third rug. of people that we interact with businesses, I should say, but, our third party vendors who provide different travel products, airlines, hotel chains, cars, payment gateways, those guys, we interface with APIs as well. So you, might consider the APIs as, all these little lines of travel related. messaging that come into our platform and we talk to all of them at the same time and allow you to search and book travel through us.
so basically you’re saying it’s how information is traded between the various systems. That’s what APIs are for.
Yeah. and it’s not always traded. Sometimes it is just pushed, sometimes there is no response and other times it’s just pulled even.
Okay. So say I am, an employer, I have a rewards program for my employees. but it’s, it’s just gift cards, maybe some t shirts or whatnot. And I want to add travel. I like switch fly. I want to bring them in. What, am I doing? What do I need to do in order to start that integration to make that happen?
How, how does that at least begin?
first it begins with hopefully you contacting switch fly and talking to us from a technology standpoint, there’s two main concerns. And then within the second concern. We maybe have five or six lesser concerns. So the first concern is really going to be around authentication and that, we commonly use, SSO, single sign on.
the majority of our clients use some sort of SSO. We prefer OAuth for, our sort of new offering in the HR tech field. some of our enterprise. Customers, use a variety of different, SSO ways that, that basically allows, our customers, systems. So say you with all of the employees who, who don’t like their gift cards anymore and want to do something else that allows you to talk to switch fly and say, Joe wants to book travel now.
He’s sick of gift cards. He can put his username and password in his, current sort of employee HR Poro and authenticate there and through the magic of SSO, that user is now authenticated at Switchfly. And is able to, act like a logged in, F. I. T. which is like a, independent traveler, so to speak, and switch flight terminology. but allows them to interact with their system. So that’s the first concern. the next concern is a collection of APIs, and that allows, our customer’s, system, in this case yours, to talk to SwitchFly, and there are, traveler profile things, who you are, how many points do you have, where do you live, do you have family members, those type of things. Earn, which is a concept, some of our enterprise customers use where you could earn points, so to speak, by booking travel, there’s burn, which is redeeming points, when you redeem points for, buying travel. There’s the actual, cancellation, modification, dough type of stuff. And then there is also sometimes used a, maybe, a push for financial, information and so for back office tasks. So those are the main concerns you would be thinking about as a customer. if you wanted to talk to Switchfly
So you mentioned some different types and there are different types of APIs. What, what are some of the various types and, how, are they differentiated?
from a Switchfly perspective specifically, or
little more
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe more general.
Okay. I think in general, the way that I think of it is we’ve got Libraries, interfaces, those things are not necessarily, network, connected, right? that might be a library that, a program, uses from another third party.
and that sort of interface that you program to is a form of an API. And then web APIs, which kind of is a more recent thing now that we’ve got the internet and whatnot. Those are the APIs that, you commonly see if you go to Facebook and look at what APIs they provide. those are all going to be, machine to machine connectivity over, over a network. And then, there’s a variety of different languages that these APIs use to, to speak to each other. the, common ones are XML. And Jason, within the travel industry, because it’s such a, long changing industry over time, a majority of the API that we interact with today are still XML, but, that’s a change, that’s been happening for many years to move everything to newer, newer forms, specifically Jason.
Okay. So you also mentioned, with switch fly with the platform with their various kind of segments, if you will, that each have their own, either single API or probably multiple APIs, I’m guessing, Things like payment gateways,
right? That, that to me, instantly brings to mind security, like me putting my money, my credit card, my info out on the internet using this, a little bit of code that we, hacked together to integrate our system. how, secure is all of this.
From a SwitchFly perspective, it’s very, secure. I, think, maybe, I don’t know, 15, 16 years ago, someone may have hacked something together. Now, definitely, that’s no longer the case. we actually have a pretty, robust sense of security, from a payment gateway perspective, those interactions all happen, from our. servers to, whoever the payment gateway is. So those, are usually not just traversing the open web, so to speak. and those aren’t just publicly accessible APIs.
Okay.
All So security obviously is a major concern. privacy, all that kind of stuff’s been, in the news a lot lately. and it’s obviously always a major concern, anything regarding data and, sharing data, but there are some more common uses of, APIs and everyday tech, can you talk us through maybe some of the more common ones that you might use every day, not even
Yeah. Yeah. I think we could talk through some common ones. think, social media, payment, those are, simple ones to, Talk about most, everyone has used Facebook or, Instagram, from the payment perspective, you’ve got maybe PayPal. and those are going to be API based interactions.
Facebook obviously are web 2. 0 giant company now meta owns Instagram, in fact, They, pioneered a lot of. API, usage. I think I had an example on there called GraphQL. That’s one form of API that is now, different sort of standard the company used. Facebook made that originally. how I remember that, the best, Is maybe in the beginning of social gaming. I’ve actually used to be in that space for a hot minute, but you may imagine things like Farmville where you invite your whole friends list. And now all of a sudden, you spawn the social web. to get more users to your app. That’s a great example of using Facebook’s APIs to you can’t really do it anymore, but to artificially advertise your application in a mass, And that’s how a lot of those companies, were able to market so effectively in the beginning because they use Facebook’s APIs that were very, very much, promiscuous in the usage of the data that they would share and allow you to then share on your behalf, so to speak,
Promiscuous uses of data. I like that. and, I don’t think either of us would have ever guessed that you were a computer gamer at all, Mark. don’t give that vibe in
any
way.
I, used, to be, I used to be, I have played, computer games in, the past, I intimately, actually created some in the past, but, no longer, those days are gone.
Now it’s all the kids playing their games. impact of, we have a note here of the impact of APIs on innovation and business efficiency. you mentioned web 2. 0, what is web 2. 0? And now we’re going to web 3. 0. can you talk about that a little high level?
I can’t. They’re fun buzzwords that I think work well for this, lightly technical podcast sort of way. we’ve got Web 1. 0, right? That was the advent of the Internet. com area. You’ve got 2. 0, which I have social media, those type of things, more connectivity. I would argue that API is an in between, between 2.
0 and 3. 0. They’re not really necessarily characterized as 2. 0. 3. 0, is now crypto and AI and things like that. but really, APIs are what allow all of these disjointed systems to communicate with each other, and It gets interesting now that we’re coming into generative AI, things like that, right?
Because those interfaces are able to communicate natural language, between you and I, we can ask a question, get a response. We don’t need to use a specific schema, which is what, API APIs are trying to solve, right? They’re trying to say, Hey, we’ve got this expected behavior. And if you use this schema, you’re going to get this expected behavior. Now with AI, generative AI, I should say, you can ask a question and get an expected answer. At least that’s the hope. So who knows what APIs will have in the future as schemas become less and less important. Maybe I’ll be able to just communicate with SwitchFly and say, Oh, I’d like to book this flight with these dates, I have this many points and you’ll just get a yes as an answer back.
Okay, very cool. Cause we’ve, AI, on the podcast. I think we’ve had at least one dedicated show around it and it’s come up often through other conversations. it’s interesting to, to mention that because usually we’ve spoken about it from a, front end user perspective of, things like switch flies, recommended hotels are using machine learning and AI to help, provide answers for, people searching for destinations and give them a little bit. more tailored and personalized choices, but from a developer standpoint, on the back end of things, how’s this AI revolution, helping hindering, affecting whatever, of your work with APIs,
my work day to day, not so much, in everyday use, I fooled around with some things, co pilots pretty useful. There’s a couple others that help developers in their day to give them the right syntax, make sure they’re following, certain paradigms, fairly, and those are useful.
from a A. P. I. Perspective, I don’t think we’re entirely there today, but certainly you can see how it’s going to get there really quick. and there’s lots of interesting conversations we can have about that from a travel perspective. When you think of, a big segment of our yeah. Customers and even our internal usage, has travel agents, right? These are professionally trained people interacting with whether it’s switch fly or other systems to book travel, at the behalf of others, commonly on a phone. but it could be other forms of communication. And if you think how AI could really change that, you could just talk to a I on the phone. You could say how you would like to book your trip. And now a I could then interpret all of that, and it could go and in some cases hit a series of a P. I. S. And it would be able to book travel on your behalf, right? A lot of our, our application, many different travel applications. You can, make little demos and do this today.
But certainly, as we progress technologically, that’s going to become More and more possible.
So if I’m following you, right? The if I let’s say I’m on chat GPT, that’s what everybody knows her for AI.
And I type something into the little search bar and I get something in return. It’s an API that is making that. Transaction happen.
Correct.
that correct? Okay.
Interesting. And so it’s interpreting my language, defeating it into chat, GBTs engine, telling it’s engine what to do, and then coming back with information.
Okay.
and even today, if I spent a little bit of time and I took, let’s just use a switch flies, employee, rewards, new offering. Let’s just say, let’s just say I took that API and let’s say, Okay. I would have to spend some time with ChatGBT and give it, change its model a little bit, give it, add some programs on top of it, but if I did that, I could say, ChatGBT, I’ve given you coming up, the framework of what to work with, and I could give it, I could say, hey, I want to book this thing that’s going to cost this amount of money, but let me book it and it would understand if I said, I’ve got 500 points and this thing is 350 points, it would understand how to do that math, give that information to an API and understand the response and then say, yes, you had enough points or you don’t.
That’s amazing.
that’s, why it’s really powerful, right? Because the more and more companies are doing this right now, but the more and more people put on top of generative AI. and the ability to use it as a interface, it really makes it. Powerful.
Oh, that’s, that is pretty cool. I like that’s one of those that once, once it’s developed and operating, I’m sure it’s fine, but like your first time, it’s probably a little freaky to use, Oh, book me a trip to whatever, and then it’s done. And yeah, that’d be, pretty cool though.
Mark, is there anything you want to cover as we close out?
I think what would be fun is, we, talked about it’s a, it’s a question we, talked about, the employee rewards, new SwitchFly offering. we could talk about just SwitchFly usage of APIs a little bit more. and one thing that we could talk about or, get into naturally that would, that would help if we’ve got, potential customers who are thinking about switch fly is, we could talk a little bit about our connector framework and how that works because one of switch flies, gems, so to speak in our crown, we’ve got employee loyalty, which is, Points basically earning burning points that type of stuff and then we’ve got you know our Dynamic packaging which is the ability to combine different travel products Dynamically with different markups commissions rules yada and then another one that I like to talk about is our sort of connector framework or our domain models.
And that’s what allows us to be useful for a lot of, a lot of our different enterprise customers, right? Because they can come to us and they can say, I want travel from Expedia and hotel beds and somebody else. And, we’re able to just say, okay, we’ll give us those credentials to these APIs, plug them in.
And now all of a sudden you can get these different travel providers to show up in the same search on SwitchFly. And that’s actually what, initially started, started SwitchFly that, that is the founding of why we exist.
Okay. So Mark, that was super helpful. just giving us a layout of APIs and the history and the technical specifications and all that. But I want to drill down, a little bit more into why this matters, especially for switch fly customers. So let’s say, okay, switch fly customer wants to come, integrate with your framework or wants to have, to see switch flies offerings or, see the dynamic packaging.
And then you mentioned this framework. So walk me through a little bit of that. Like the implementation of that. is it easy to get started with switch flies APIs and what access that gives, but something else you mentioned that I would love for you to touch on is, That this really goes back to switch flies founding as a company that APIs are so central to the platform where you guys are able to offer certain, customers that it really is like foundational to your business in general.
So to walk me through a little bit of that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll, hit your first question real quick, just on, how ease, the ease of implementation. And then we can talk about all that fun, connector fat fabric is, I, say sometimes, but from an ease of implementation standpoint, when we talk about how easy it is to implement, to switch fly, we’re really focusing on, Employee rewards, HR tech.
That’s where we have spent a lot of time to make it easy or as easy as possible to implement. There’s still APIs involved, but our goal is to have really simple APIs, bulletproof documentation around it. And, really quick, get your business started booking travel, quick to market, so to speak, implementation time. And, definitely if you’re interested, you can hit up Switchfly and we can walk you through the basics of that. Someone at your company will need to be able to write You know, to our API’s that’s implied. I’m imply, I’m implying that as a switchfly customer, you probably would have someone, or you’re paying someone to write to us else it probably wouldn’t, really make sense, but it’s easy to write to us. so I think that’s the answer to your, first question. in terms of just historically, holistically, why are API is so important? I think they’re actually important to digital travel all around, right? of our third party vendors of travel, CRSs, GDSs, that’s GDSs are to provide flights. all of these are travel technology companies who are providing Travel products, flights, hotels, car, through APIs to other people who are going to consume them. So that’s the method that they are selling their products. The only method is through APIs. And, one of the crown jewels that Switchfly has from just why do we exist is dynamic packaging. And that’s the ability to do a package booking, right? hotel, car, air, at the same time, In real time with different business rules, markup commissions et cetera. and in order to do that, in order to have a dynamic package, the implication is your inventory is also dynamic, right?
Also, it would be static. So just to have, dynamic inventory, it means that we’re able to connect to all these different sources of this inventory. Real time, whenever you make a search and there’s many, there’s, I don’t know how many there is total, there’s probably hundreds of different sources of travel.
switch flight doesn’t implement to all hundreds, but we could. And that’s all part of our, sort of structural framework that we’ve created and that is core to our business. And it’s also how we think about travel. We take all of these different Travel products from different companies by communicating with them through their A.
- I. S. hotel chain one. You’ve got a hotel chain to you have the same hotel. You guys are both. Sending it to us, you have different ways of thinking about that hotel, but we internally genericize that hotel, think of it as a switch fly hotel, and then we can think about the two different prices and rooms that you sent, and we can think about it all generically and do markups and commissions and discounts and yada, yada, yada to it. And finally, if needed dynamically package it with a flight. And that is a powerful thing in our digital travel industry. And it’s one of the things that Switchslide does very well. So without all this APIs, that wouldn’t really exist for us. And, I don’t actually think we would exist as a business.
Okay. What strikes me is I just go on Google and I just look for some flights or some hotels and it just shows me some things I filter by price and then just boom, move on my life. And I’m realizing that it’s actually really complicated for it to be able to do that. And same thing, switch flight, I can go to a switch fly.
I can search for different things. I want to go here on these dates. I’m looking for this price. That’s incredibly complicated. And so I appreciate people like you being able to build things that make it easy for people like me who know nothing, and I’m just trying to get where I’m trying to go.
Yeah. it’s, it’s a, fascinating, domain actually. and it’s quite fun to, think about all these little different problems that exist and, be able to work with it and bring it to our customers.
It’s very cool. Very cool. Mark, I’m so glad you’re able to join us. we usually don’t have, such expertise on the phone with some
real clear. No, you guys are experts in what you do, but this really technical. I don’t know anybody that could explain APIs like that. So I’m, glad Ian, I don’t mean to disparage You you and James are experts in your field,
No, that was.
is real, domain expert. It’s,
Yeah, no, that was, brilliant. Thank you so much, Mark. That’s a really concise way of explaining something incredibly complex. I’ve played with the very like, Edges of building API stuff on, little custom code workflow actions, but nothing compared to what’s going on inside the platform. We appreciate it.
yeah, thank you.
Yeah. My pleasure.
Okay. Real quick. what’s your favorite place you’ve ever traveled to?
My favorite place I’ve ever traveled to. I think as of now, I’m going to say the Isle of Skye, which is at the northernmost Tip in Scotland,
Wow.
Cool. Okay. That’s a new one for the show. I like that. Okay. I’ve never been there. Okay.
pretty, small.
📍 I’ve heard beautiful things. I think I have a friend that’s going there soon. Very cool. Very cool. Okay. Mark, Ian, gentlemen, appreciate you guys. Thank you for your expertise as always and looking forward to the next episode.
We’ll see you
All right. Thank you very much. Cheers.
Thanks y’all.
