Cruises are becoming more and more popular option to choose for a holiday. Cruise ships provide entertainment and the level of luxury compared to the best and most exquisite hotels. And when you add ocean sunsets and numerous port towns ready to be explored, cruises are hard to beat. So as to fulfil the needs of eager holiday makers, technology comes to help.

Travel APIs are used everywhere. You can’t find a flight without using an API and you can’t book a room without an API, and cruises are no exception. Typically a cruise API involves a booking API and an itinerary API. While booking APIs are quite common (for example Traveltek offers great booking API specifically for cruises), itinerary APIs are kind of dark horses we don’t know much about.

Cruise itinerary APIs focus on the route and details about the trip that become available after the booking is complete. So itinerary API will be able to make a schedule for the trip, including the time of the arrival and departure, the type of ship, the name of the deck, the room and more. This provides benefits for both parties: the travel provider and the customer. The travel provider will have all the necessary info neatly organized for further use; the customer will feel taken care of.

If we want to get a closer look at some examples, let’s take AwardWallet.

AwardWallet offers Email Parsing API which can work in several ways. First of all, as an email parser this API collects travel data from incoming confirmation emails and structures it. Secondly, it gives all the needed details about the itinerary. If the information from the email is not sufficient, the API will involve external sources to get more data.

Now let’s dig a bit deeper to understand the process of parsing an email. When an email comes in to be processed, it gets into a queue. Typically the parsing process goes automatically and takes just a few seconds. It will result in successful extracting of the data from the body of the email or the attached files (be it PDF or other formats). The data then is structured and returned in JSON format ready to use. In the event when automated parsing was not possible for some reason, the email is redirected for a manual review. If you want to see an example of how the email is parsed, what kind of information is retrieved and what the end result is, you can download an email to a test page and check it yourself.

Email Parsing API acts like an intermediary between a customer and cruise trip providers. AwardWallet supports a large variety of major providers which means that the parsing process will most likely be a success. The list of providers include: Celebrity Cruises, Norwegian Cruise, Oceania Cruises, Royal Caribbean, etc. The whole list is available here.

Documentation: awardwallet.com/api/email