As you may know, carriers sometimes promote their train service using a specific brand.
For example, the blazing fast Frecciarossa family from Trenitalia, the queen of sleepers Nightjet from ÖBB, or the elegant TGV Lyria operated by SNCF and SBB.
We are now happy to display these brands in the API and on the Dashboard.
Improved carrier data
We’ve always recognized the importance of high quality carrier data, including normalized names and important logotypes. You can now enjoy an even better data set as we’ve rebuilt our carrier system from the ground up. Adding thousands of new fine-grained mappings.
With this change, along with Service brands, you can trust that you have the best possible data for every train and ticket.
None of us likes to wait for tickets to load. No fun at all. We're all waiting for the carriers to speed up their systems. But we have good news! To save you time, we are excited to introduce very precise and super fast price estimates.
Our Dashboard has always automatically fetched prices for a couple of recommended trips. From now on, you will also see estimated prices for all trips from a carrier that supports estimates. Getting live price information is only a click away.
As you may know, tickets may not always be available. This is usually because they haven’t been released yet, it’s too close to departure, or there’s a planned or unplanned disruption.
Until now, the only way of knowing if a train is available to book has been to try and fetch prices. Now, if you see a price estimate, you can be sure that the ticket is available to book.
Estimates and availability are also ready to use in the API, helping you speed up your custom booking solutions. See the documentation.
We’re rolling out estimates and availability on a carrier-by-carrier basis. We already cover the majority of our carrier inventory, including ÖBB, DB, and Eurostar, among others. We’ll continue adding carriers in the coming weeks, with Trenitalia, Renfe, and SNCF next.
Hello world. Beep boop! ✿⋆.˚⋆₊ ⊹
We got ourselves a new website. You may already have seen it as it was launched in utmost secret this summer.
The new site describes our three core solutions: The API, Dashboard, and Embeds, each with a dedicated section. As always, our documentation and carriers inventory is available online.
The new site also introduces the Changelog – where you are reading this update and all our previous product updates.
The vast majority of tickets issued by All Aboard will be in the format of a PDF with all the details necessary to board the train. One exception is in the UK, where about 25% of the domestic tickets issued in the 🇬🇧UK are so-called Ticket on Departure. These tickets can be issued from a machine at the train station by swiping a credit card (which does not have to be used for the purchase of the ticket) and entering a code.
When placing an order for one of these tickets on All Aboard, the code and instructions are now easily available on the Dashboard:
Ticket on Delivery in The API
With the introduction of Ticket on Delivery, a change is required in your API implementation to fetch these tickets. Tickets have previously only been accessed as a “Resource". This change introduces a new type called TicketOnDeparture. To query for either type of ticket, you will need to change your query to fetch them as fragments. Please refer to the documentation on how to get tickets.
This is not a breaking change and your current implementation will continue to work without changing your queries. It will, however, become a required change in the future, so we encourage you to make the change at their earliest convenience.
Making multiple bookings for the same group of travelers is now easier than ever. In the Dashboard, you can now reuse passenger details from an order when making a new booking.
To do so, simply open up an order and hit “New order for passengers”. It takes you back to the Dashboard home, but with both the ticket booking and rail pass booking configured with the same passenger group. Once you proceed to passenger details, everything will be filled in and ready to go.
Faster ticket fetching
As you may know, it sometimes takes a few moments after a booking until the tickets or rail passes have been issued by the carriers. From now on, we will check for these files much more often to get them to you as soon as possible.
This is all made clear and visible on the order page:
With this change, ticket emails are now opt-in instead of the default when booking via the Dashboard. If you wish to continue getting these emails, simply enable that option in the booking flow under Contract Information.
Searching for an order
While we all love a long and growing list of orders, finding a specific order has surely been time-consuming in the Dashboard. We've now introduced a search bar where you can enter booking references, passenger names, and rail pass numbers.
As a bonus, the order list now also loads much faster.
We are happy to report that as of tomorrow morning, Eurostar passholder fares will be available in the All Aboard Dashboard and API.
This is a key milestone in our progress toward offering a wide set of seat reservations and passholder fares across Europe, with more operators to be supported in the coming weeks and months.
Try it out
To book a passholder fare for Eurostar, sign in to the All Aboard Dashboard, and tick the "Passholder fares” check box in the regular ticket booking flow.
For your accounting
Seat reservations and passholder fares will be handled and defined much like regular tickets in the billing documents provided to you by us.