Refund Flight Tickets

Overview

The Refund Flight Tickets method is designed to facilitate the process of refunding a flight ticket in a single, seamless API call.

Technical overview

The Refund Flight Tickets method is part of the larger Booking Management API, available in RPC/JSON format and designed to operate in a stateless way. When successful, the API will automatically commit the changes applied to a Sabre reservation.

While this API is designed to operate in a stateless way, it accepts both sessionless (ATK) and session-based (ATH) tokens. When a call is made to this API via a session-based token, the session (AAA) is cleared before and after execution.

General logic

The logic executed by Refund Flight Tickets is defined by the electronic documents submitted. Firstly, the application will retrieve details for each document and then validates if the requirements for the refund procedure are met. The analysis includes coupon status, refund pricing, and whether all included documents belong to the same reservation.

After each successful refund, the reservation is updated (EnhancedEndtransactionRQ).

Note: This feature requires that the issuing carrier participates in Automated Refunds and that the feature is supported in your market. Additionally, the feature Automated Refunds has to be ordered for your agency through (Sabre Central).

Orchestration

The APIs orchestrated within Refund Flight Tickets include:

Refund Flight Tickets request structure

The Refund Flight Tickets method cancels electronic documents as specified. This allows you to submit a list of up to 12 elements from the same reservation to be canceled.

  • errorHandlingPolicy allows you to define the API's behavior in the event of an error. Two options are available:
    • HALT_ON_ERROR (default): Execution is stopped if an error is encountered, a rollback is executed, or if some products were successfully executed to ensure the original state of the reservation is preserved.
    • ALLOW_PARTIAL_CANCEL: Execution continues even when some products failed to cancel.
  • targetPCC is used to specify which city (PCC) should change context using ContextChange (AAA). If empty, or if it equals the current city, the context doesn't change.
  • tickets is used to provide a list of 1 to 12 tickets.
    • number is used to specify the 13-digit electronic document numbers to be refunded.
  • receivedFrom is an optional element to specify whether the API should sign the booking change with a specific value (default=LW CANCEL API).
  • notification allows you to define options to notify after transaction succeeded. Two options are available:
    • email an email will be send to the addresses in the PNR after finishing the transaction.
    • queuePlacement the PNR will be placed on one or more queues after finshing the transaction.
  • designatePrinters allows you to define printers to be used during the transaction. Currently only one option is available:
    • printerProfileNumber assigns a previously defined printer profile.
    • hardcopy assigns a hardcopy printer for the transaction.
    • invoiceItinerary assigns an invoice and itinerary printer for the transaction.
    • ticket assigns a ticket printer for the transaction.
  • confirmationId can be used as an alternative to tickets. The application will apply the tickets from the entire reservation in this case.

Refund Flight Tickets response structure

The Refund Flight Tickets response contains:

  • errors contains errors and warnings (if applicable). If not present (empty or contains warnings only) then the execution is successful. Warnings might be returned for unsuccessful cancellation of a particular ticket when requested ErrorHandlingPolicy=ALLOW_PARTIAL_CANCEL.
  • request contains the required parameters to send your request to the service
  • tickets contains detailed information about the refund of each ticket

Limitations

  • The refund of NDC documents is supported in CancelBooking
  • A maximum of 12 documents is supported
  • All documents must belong to the same reservation (PNR)
  • EMDs are currently not supported

Error handling

This section illustrates the current error handling logic for Refund Flight Tickets:

Note: Please access the Refund Flight Tickets - Error List section for additional details on possible errors returned by Refund Flight Tickets.

Dependency between Error Policy and Error Category

The error type UNABLE_TO_REFUND_TICKET can be returned with the category CANCELLATION_ERROR, as well as with a WARNING. The category depends on ErrorHandlingPolicy sent in the request. For HALT_ON_ERROR, CANCELLATION_ERROR displays, and for ALLOW_PARTIAL_CANCEL, WARNING displays.

  • If you've set the API to not accept any failures (policy=HALT_ON_ERROR), then any failure in a downstream API being called results in an error in the Refund Flight Tickets response.

  • If you've set the API to accept partial successes (policy=ALLOW_PARTIAL_CANCEL), then returning downstream API errors suggests that the entire refund process failed. However, this is not quite true. Therefore, these errors/failures result as warnings in the Refund Flight Tickets response.

Errors/Warnings returned by downstream services

The Refund Flight Tickets response contains errors and warnings returned by downstream APIs and these are always returned as a WARNING.