What is protel I/O?
protel I/O is a cloudbased enterprise hospitality framework, established on the philosophy of Open Integration. Protel’s Open Integration strategy empowers Hotel Owners to leverage “best in class” hotel technology solutions by providing a robust API integration platform, documentation and support via protel Services Marketplace.
protel believes that Hotel owners, whether chain or independent, should have the flexibility to choose one or many vendors who provide the right business technology solutions. Hotel owners should also be able to quickly and cost effectively test, QA and bring these systems into production.
protel I/O also enables the open sharing of enterprise data across the entire connected hospitality ecosystem with integrated protel Genius analytics. Genius unleashes the full potential of enterprise wide Predictive analytics.
It is important to understand the full scope and benefits of this enhanced integration, data sharing and the impact this can have on guest satisfaction and ultimately, hotel revenue.
protel I/O is an Enterprise Hospitality Framework. At the core it uses a powerful Enterprise Service Bus to route messages between applications that are connected to the protel I/O enabled hospitality application ecosystem. Protel provides secure, programmatic access to customer data using simple, powerful, and secure programming interfaces. The Protel IO APIs are designed to provide optimal integration with not only with protel PMS, but also with industry leading technology providers that are connected to the ecosystem
Central Reservation Systems (CRS),
Channel Managers(CMS)
Web Booking Engines (WBE)
Point of Sale (POS)
Guest Relationship Management / Loyalty(CRM)
Mechanical Systems
Engineering Systems
etc
Target Audience
To use this guide, the reader should have basic familiarity with software development, web services and basic knowledge of hotel operations and services related to the hospitality industry. Comprehending these concepts is mandatory for understanding the requirements for integrations and for data flows across the hospitality ecosystem.
1.2. protel I/O uses open API standards
The protel I/O API complies, wherever possible to the standards set by Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) and the Open Travel Alliance (OTA). Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) and OTA are global not-for-profit trade associations that publishes technical specifications designed to promote easy interoperability among systems used in the hospitality and travel industries. The Protel Open API is based on the HTNG web service standard for communication between systems.
Specific to protel
Protel also publishes some non-HTNG standard specifications to fulfil functionality areas where a suitable standard message type does not exist or for vendors who prefer to use a lighter JSON based message structure
Map2Any
In addition, the Protel I/O API supports additional API services to map the internal api’s to any custom format JSON or XML. Protel’s Map2Any allows protel to quickly and easily adapt to an Integration partners special format. The Integration partner needs to provide either an .xsd Extensilble Schema Definition or a JSON schema file and protel’s Integration team will work with the Integration Partner’s technical team to map the relevant values. This often makes the integration a simple drag and drop operation.
Working with protel as a Software Partner
Protel Software Partner Program enables hospitality technology solution providers the ability to build, QA and certify an integration with protel, ensuring a seamless deployment and a high quality customer experience across the hospitality ecosystem.
protel needs to ensure all of our software integrations meet our reliability and quality standards, we have the following program requirements. The introduction of protel I/O has significantly enhanced integration possibilities for our Software Partners. Protel has the following standard project requirements:
| Requirement | Details | |
|---|---|---|
1 | Contact Information | We each share named contacts, including stakeholders, who will work on the integration project. We jointly define an escalation process for issue resolution. Name, email, Mobile and escalation path |
2 | Delivery schedule | We develop a delivery timeline to help set reasonable expectations for prospects and customers. |
3 | Collaborative Development & Testing | We collaborate to build and test the integration. We are delivering a joint integration. We develop a joint test plan and execute endtoend testing to ensure correctly functioning interoperability between systems. |
4 | Communication | Real time communication is critical to complete integrations is a timely manner. Software Partners are expected to allocate the appropriate resources and to communicate regularly via agreed messenger technology (Slack, Skype etc) |
5 | Backward Compatibility | Protel strives to ensure backwards compatibility. Where possible, existing API integrations should continue to work with all future versions. Protel will provide advance notice to any potentially impacted customers |
6 | Successful Implementation | We will work together to successfully complete each data flow. Protel carefully schedules integrations to ensure resources are available to work on Issues that arise during the pilot or later stages. These are then treated with high priority and addressed in a timely manner. |
7 | Documentation | We author documentation covering limitations, features, specific configuration instructions, versions supported, any special circumstances or assumptions made in the integration. |
8 | Excellent Support | Protel want to ensure our mutual customers receive excellent support. We will work with our software partners to ensure that we have clearly defined and documented “who does what and when”. We will clearly define the customer support plan together to ensure there are no gaps and our demarcation points are clear. |
9 | Business Recovery | Protel will work with each software partner to identify situations where normal services can be disrupted. Then we will identify and jointly document the steps required to re-establish data communications and data integrity |