Reseller & OTA API

Sell a RentalTide operator's rentals and tours from your own platform — an OTA, a hotel concierge desk, a travel agency, or any booking site. The Channel API is a small, purpose-built surface: one key, four calls, and you're selling.

GET https://v3.api.rentaltide.com/channel/v1/products
Authorization: Bearer rtc_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Three ways to resell

No code? Read RTDN — you'll be live in five minutes. The rest of this page is the Channel API, for platforms that run their own checkout and need live availability plus programmatic bookings.

Five-minute quickstart

Run this with your sandbox key first — it is the same three commands, against your own demo operator, with a reset button:

Then DELETE $BASE/bookings/<bookingId> to clean up, or POST $BASE/sandbox/reset to wipe every test booking at once. That's the whole API — everything below is detail.

The model in one paragraph

You are the merchant of record: you take the guest's payment on your side, then push a confirmed booking to RentalTide with the price you charged. The booking lands on the operator's calendar as fully paid, appears on tour manifests, and counts toward capacity like any direct sale. Your commission rate is stamped on every booking you create, so both sides settle from the same numbers. There are no holds to manage and no payment webhooks to handle — availability, book, cancel.

Authentication

Every call sends the key the operator gave you, either way works:

GET /channel/v1/me is the smoke test. It returns "mode": "live" or "mode": "test" — assert on it in your deploy checks so a sandbox key can never reach production, or the reverse. A single-operator key returns { "connection": { connectionId, channelName, merchantId, commissionRate, … } }. A platform (OTA) key returns { "channel": { slug, name, merchants: [ { merchantId, commissionRate, offerAllInventory, … } ] } } — one entry per operator that has opted in to you, each with their commission rate. Errors always come back as { "error": "<machine_code>", "message": "<human text>" }; branch on the code.

1. Pull the catalog

Returns every product you've been offered:

seasons carries the operator's retail pricing so you can price your own listings:

• Both maps are keyed by weekday name (Monday … Sunday).
• dailyPrices values are the full-day rate.
• hourlyPrices values are a rule object — basePrice is the per-hour rate, minimumHours/maximumHours bound the rental length, and multiHourDiscounts (if any) lists { hours, discountPercentage } breaks. Older listings may carry a bare number instead of the object; treat it as basePrice.
• startingPrice + priceUnit is the cheapest of the above, pre-computed for card display. Tours do not use seasons at all — see below.
• Tax: prices are pre-tax. taxes lists the rates the operator applies to this product (already narrowed to the ones that apply — some products are exempt from some taxes) and totalTaxRate is their sum in percent. Charge the guest price × (1 + totalTaxRate / 100) and send that tax-inclusive figure as totalPrice when you book; the operator remits the tax.

Tours are priced differently

A product with "type": "tour" is not sold by the hour or the day. Ignore its seasons entirely — the array is empty, or present with every rate at 0. A tour's fares arrive in tourPricing instead:

• priceUnit is person (a per-head ticket) or charter (a whole-boat private booking), never hr/day.
• startingPrice is the standard adult fare, not the cheapest tier. Build your own fare table from priceTiers — displaying the child price as "from" is a mis-sell.
• minParticipants is the smallest party the operator will run. Treat it as your minimum sellable quantity.
• A private charter has isPrivate: true and a privatePricing block instead of tiers: basePrice covers baseHeadcount guests and each guest beyond that costs extraParticipantPrice.

Every product carries merchantId / merchantName. With an OTA key you get the union of every opted-in operator's offer set — group by merchantId for your supplier pages. Cache the catalog and refresh it daily; it changes when an operator edits listings, changes their offer set, or connects/disconnects — not per booking.

2. Check availability

Real time, and answered by the same engine the operator's own checkout uses — turnaround buffers, maintenance blocks, and capacity overrides included. If this endpoint says available, the booking call will succeed moments later.

• locationId is optional — omit it and each product's own location is used (an OTA key spans many operators, so one locationId rarely fits).
• Timestamps are ISO 8601 with an offset; the window may span up to 366 days.
• Up to 25 productIds per request; lines come back in the order you asked.
• unitsFree is null for seat-based products (tours) — trust available.
• unknown_product means the id isn't offered to your connection. Products the merchant hasn't offered you answer exactly like products that don't exist.

3. Create a booking

You've collected the guest's payment — now push the confirmed sale. Idempotency-Key is required: pick a unique string per checkout (your own order id is perfect) and reuse it on retries.

201 Created:

Store bookingId — it's what you'll use to read or cancel. commissionRate is the operator's rate for you (with an OTA key each operator sets their own), so settlement numbers come straight off the booking.

Idempotency, precisely:

Bookings are created under the same lock the operator's checkout holds, so a race against a direct customer can't double-book — one of you wins, the other gets unavailable.

4. Read or cancel

Cancel is idempotent — cancelling an already-cancelled booking returns 200 with "alreadyCancelled": true. You can only see and cancel bookings your connection created; anything else is a 404. A booking the operator has already checked in or completed returns 409 not_cancellable — call them.

Fees

RentalTide charges the operator a flat $5 platform fee per booking you send (added to their RentalTide account, reversed if you cancel). Nothing is charged to you and nothing is deducted from what you remit — your commission is the only thing between the sale price and the operator's payout.

Getting the operator paid

You collected the guest's money, so you owe the operator sale price − your commission for every non-cancelled booking. Both sides read the same numbers:

• You: partners.rentaltide.com → Reseller & OTA API → Settlement — per operator, per month (by rental date): bookings, gross, your commission, owed.
• The operator: the same figures under Settings → OTAs & Resellers.

Declare how you pay on your portal page (method, cadence, net days, and an optional payout-enrolment link such as Hyperwallet / Tipalti / PayPal Payouts) — operators see it on your card before they connect. Then pay on that cadence; each booking's reference and bookingId reconcile line by line. Automated payouts through RentalTide are on the roadmap.

Managing operators

From the same portal page you can, per operator: set a custom commission (overrides your default; the operator sees it read-only), pause (their listings drop out of your catalog until you resume — they cannot un-pause themselves), or remove (they'd need to click Connect again). Pause channel stops your key for everyone at once.

Staying in sync

Two complementary options:

• Poll availability before showing a checkout — it's cheap and always right.
• Webhooks: ask the operator to add your endpoint under Settings → Webhooks subscribed to booking.* events. You'll be notified when any booking is created, cancelled, or rescheduled — including direct sales that consume capacity you were about to sell. See Webhooks for signatures and retries.

Testing

Use your sandbox key — Channel API sandbox. It is the same endpoints against a demo operator of your own, with POST /channel/v1/sandbox/reset to start over, and GET /me returning "mode": "test" so you can assert which environment you are pointed at. It is also the right place to reproduce a bug after go-live, rather than experimenting on an operator's live account.

Limits & conventions

• 300 requests per minute per connection (X-RateLimit-* headers on every response).
• Timestamps: ISO 8601 with offset in, UTC out.
• Prices are decimal dollars in the connection's currency.
• Keys can be rotated by the operator at any time — handle invalid_api_key by contacting them, not by retrying.

Building a deeper integration? The Channel API is for reselling. If you're building an app that lives inside RentalTide or needs broader account access, see the Developer platform and the server-to-server API.