Overview

An Internet Booking Engine (IBE) lets guests search availability and book directly with a hotel — no OTA or channel manager in between. Because Apaleo’s Booking API connects directly to the PMS, availability and pricing are always current and bookings land in the system immediately.

This guide covers the base technical flow for building an IBE on Apaleo and walks through each step in detail.

The booking flow

An IBE built on Apaleo follows this sequence:

1. Load properties — fetch the properties available for booking from GET /inventory/v1/properties
2. Search offers — retrieve available rates and unit groups for the guest’s chosen dates using GET /booking/v1/offers
3. Select an offer — present rates to the guest; optionally load add-on services with GET /booking/v1/service-offers
4. Collect guest details — name, email, and address for the booker and primary guest
5. Authorise a payment — collect card details and authorise the pre-payment amount using Adyen Drop-in
6. Create the booking — submit the reservation to Apaleo via POST /booking/v1/bookings, passing the PSP reference from step 5

Before you start

This guide covers the Apaleo API flow. The payment step (step 5) requires an Apaleo Pay integration with Adyen Drop-in. Set that up first — see Apaleo Pay: setup and testing.

Reference implementation

A minimal working implementation of this flow — using Node.js, Express, and vanilla JS — is available at IBE-DEMO. It is intentionally simple and intended as a workbook for the base flow described in this guide.

Where to go next