Overview

Inventory transports can be used as primary connections between Departure and Arrival airports in a template, like live flight offers. At the moment, transport can be of type Flight, Bus or Train.

Additionally, there is no match pre-condition regarding the airports of inventory flights and the existence of airport stops at the template level, meaning an inventory flight can be used in a template that does not include an airport.

00:00: This guide will teach you how to create your own inventory transports on TripBuilder. 00:05: To create a new Transport Inventory product, navigate to Inventory and then click on Products. Find Transports, and click on it. Please see the information on the screen that you will need to create a Transport Product in TripBuilder. 00:20: You will be directed to the transports overview page. On this page, you will see all your created transports. If you just get started, the page will be empty. But we will show you now how to fill it with your own created transportation. Inventory transports can be used as primary connections between Departure and Arrival airports in a template, like live flight offers. 00:43: To create a new one, click on "Create Transport". 00:47: Start by selecting the currency in each this transport is offered. 00:51: Then, click on "Save". 00:54: In this section, the Outbound and Return transports can be created in terms of departure and arrival data. Here it is also possible to add alternative transport for the return transport. 01:05: Click on "Add new segment". 01:08: You can start by selecting the type of transportation. At the moment, TripBuilder offers Flight, Bus and Train as types of transportations. Be aware that even if you select Bus or Train, departure and arrival locations are still Airports. 01:24: Start by selecting the departure date. 01:27: Then, select the departure time. You can use the selector provided, or write the time in the hh:mm format. 01:36: Add the departure location airport. You can write a city, or the IATA Airport code. 01:43: Repeat the same process for the arrival. Add an arrival date, time, and airport. 01:49: Now, define the carrier, on the Carrier field. You can use the airline IATA code, for example, LH. 01:58: Additionally, you can add to the information who Operates this transport, and the Leg Number. 02:04: If the transport you're creating has layovers or stops, you can add new segments, by clicking on "Add new segment". This will add a new segment, and you can repeat the process, providing the same information: departure date, time and airport, and arrival date, time and airport. 02:22: Lastly, you can now add the information about the arrival (Inbound/Return direction) to your product. On "Return Direction" you can click on "Add new Segment" and it will allow you to fill the information about the flight/route of the return, in the same way we just saw. 02:38: Now, to define the prices, click on the "Service Categories" tab. 02:43: Service Categories can be defined per transport direction (Outbound, Return and Alternatives). For each transport direction, more than one Service Category can be defined. To do so, Click on "Add new price category" of Outbound or Inbound. 03:00: A new field will show, where you can define the Class of the service, Product Category, and Pricing. 03:07: You can start by defining the class, choosing from Economy, Premium Economy, Business or First. 03:14: If necessary, you can add a managed Product Category to this Service Category. 03:19: Now, let's define the pricing of the Transport. The only mandatory field is the Adults pricing, but you also have the possibility to add different prices for Children (Age between 2 and 11) and Infants (Age from 0 to 1 years old). 03:35: The Pricing is divided by the Price per PAX 03:39: and Taxes per PAX. 03:41: And both this fields are displayed in the frontend. 03:44: You can also add more pricing categories to a transport direction, by clicking on Add new price Category. 03:51: This will open a new field, and you can now add new pricing, for a different class or a different product category. 03:58: To add prices to the other directions, go to that direction. In this example, Return Direction does not have pricing yet. Click on "Add new price category". You can repeat the steps to add pricing to the return direction, the process is the same. 04:14: When you have defined all the pricing, Click on "Save". 04:18: You will see a success message, informing you that the product was saved. 04:23: To make this Inventory product visible and usable, click on the Action menu. 04:28: Then, Click on "Express Publish". 04:31: You will see now a "Published" information on your Transport Inventory product. Now, it's visible in the Planner for users to select this transportation (if it matches the dates and times of their trip) and can also be used inside Templates. If you're interested in connecting this transports in templates, check our video about the topic. 04:51: Cancelation Policies, Tags, Miscellaneous and Integration tabs are explained in other videos. Make sure to watch them if you haven't yet! 05:01: Finally, allotments can also be defined to Transports Products. Make sure to check our video about working with allotments in TripBuilder. 05:10: We hope you enjoyed this TripBuilder guide on creating an Inventory Transportation. Thank you, and hope to see you soon!

How to create Inventory Transports?

Before creating an inventory transport, the following information must be known:

• Start/End date and time
• Departure and Arrival airports
• Segments (if applicable)
• Carrier Code
• Net-sale price
• Type of transport

To generate an inventory transport:

• Go to Cockpit
• Click on Inventory
• Click on Products
• Select Transports

• Click on Create Transport
• Select an adequate currency
• Click Save

Adding a Description

In this section, the Outbound and Inbound (or Return Direction) transports can be created in terms of departure and arrival data. Here it is also possible to add alternative transport for the return transport. To do so:

• Click on the tab Description
• Click on Add new segment

• Add the data asked in the modal

• Select the type of transport (Flight, Train, Bus)

• Click Save

If the transport has more than one segment, click on Add new segment again and repeat the steps mentioned before. The same steps apply to adding an Inbound transport (or Return Direction) and Alternative Returns.

Adding Service Categories

Service Categories can be defined per transport direction (Outbound, Return and Alternatives). For each transport direction, more than one Service Category can be defined. To add a Service Category:

• Click on the tab Service Categories
• Click on Add new price category

• Select the adequate transport Class (Economy, Premium Economy, Business, First)
• Fill in the required information
• To add more than one Service Category to the same transport direction, click again on Add a new price category and fill in the information
  • Find more information about the display of flight taxes here. 
• Click Save

Adding Allotments

Inventory flights can have assigned allotments by Direction and Service category. To learn more about allotments, please see this article.

Additional Tabs

00:00: In this guide we will cover what you can do in other tabs of an Inventory Product when you're creating or editing it. 00:07: The Description tab, Pricing or Room Categories or Service Categories tabs, Amenities tab, and Picture tabs are explained in each Inventory Creation video you have available. 00:19: In your library of Videos and Guidance, you can also find a video dedicated to Cancellation Policies. 00:26: In this video, we will focus on the following tabs: Tags; Translate: Miscellaneous; Integration; Reselling; and Summary. All of this tabs exist on all of the Inventory Products you can create, and they are similar in all of the products. 00:43: Let's start with tags. Select the "Tags" tab of any inventory product. 00:48: You will see a list of all the tags that have been created in your instance. If none has been created yet, this list will be empty. 00:57: You can also see if this product has any tags associated to it. 01:01: To create a new tag, click on "Create new tag". 01:05: Give the tag a name, and click on Ok. 01:08: To add your newly created tag, or any other existing tag, click on the plus icon of any tag. It will add that tag to the product. 01:18: Tags are mostly useful on listings, templates and modules, where you can find Inventory by searching for the tags. 01:26: Let's move on to translate. 01:28: As the name says, this is where you can translate the information that is visible in the frontend of your Inventory Product. 01:35: For each available frontend language (in Discovery, Planner and Checkout), that is set in your settings, you have the possibility to translate the original text. 01:45: In some cases, like Areas, and airports, you have some pre-filled translations. 01:51: Let's move on. Choose the "Miscellaneous" option. 01:55: On Miscellaneous, you can set the Supplier and the Operator of the Inventory product. To know more about working with Suppliers, check our video about it. 02:05: You can also set a Commission Category, from the ones already defined by your TripBuilder Admin. This commission categories define how much commission an agency gets when this product is sold. 02:16: On Internal Remarks, you can leave any comments you might find suitable. This field is not visible by Agent users, or end-users. 02:25: In this last information, you can see if this Inventory product is included in any Template. If so, you will see a link to that template, and their status. 02:35: Now, let's navigate to the "Integration" section. 02:39: This tab allows you to create an external reference for this product that you might use in other external softwares. 02:46: The major integrations are included, like Midoco, GIATA, Amadeus, between others. 02:54: You can then add the external ID you might use to identify this Inventory Product. The information will then be passed via the Booking API to the external system defined. 03:05: The next tab is Reselling. 03:07: On Partner Reselling, you can share this Inventory Product with other Travel Agencies, Distribution Channels or Partners. For this to be possible, your TripBuilder Admin must have reselling rules and markups created. 03:20: The last tab is a summary tab. Navigate to it. 03:24: You have the ID of your product, and it's revision. The revision is the number of edits made to this inventory product. Name indicates the name of the Inventory Product. Lastly, Status indicates the current status of the Product. Status reflects if the product is Published and visible on the frontend, or if it is in a Draft status, when you are creating it, and lastly Incomplete, if you are making changes to it. 03:51: Also on the Summary tab, you have the possibility to mark certain inventory products as "Available on Request". 03:58: When a specific component needs to be manually requested, booked or confirmed at all times, then you can set it up to be always available on request. 04:07: Marking this option as "ON", will make this product not directly booked in the time of the booking. 04:13: Lastly, on the Summary tab, in some Inventory Products, you will have the Room or Service Categories, Amenities and Special Offers displayed. 04:23: This guide covered the common tabs of Inventory products. See you next time!

Learn more about the use of the Additional Tabs in the following overview. 

Inventory Flights at the Template level

Inventory Flights can be added to a template via Cockpit through Flight Configuration. To learn more about how to add inventory transports to a template, please check this article.

Connecting Flights

Inventory flights can be used as connecting transfers between stops within a pre-existing template or an Individual Trip (at the planner level). These types of flights have only one direction (Outbound) defined. Below, the setup of both scenarios (at the template level and at the individual trip level) is shown.

Connecting Flights within Templates

To utilize connecting flights within a pre-existing template:

• Create an Outbound/Inbound flight (as described above).

• Create the Connecting Flight itself, where only the Outbound flight is defined (on the Description tab), as well as the respective Service Category.
  • the Departure and Arrival date must match the template architecture. Additionally, the flight must occur between the time gap of the Outbound/Inbound flights.

After creating all the necessary flights, the Outbound/Inbound ones need to be associated to the template. There is no need to aggregate the Connecting Flight to the template. To do this:

• Go to Cockpit
• Click on Inventory
• Click on Package Builder
• Click on Itinerary Templates
• Search for the intended template that will use inventory flights (if the template already exists)OR
• Click on Create Template to create a new template

Within the template

• Go to the Stops tab
• Add a placeholder of type flight for the Connecting Flight
  • Click on Add connection
  • Click on Click to add a new connection
  • Click on Create Transfer Placeholder
  • Select type flight
  • Define start locations as airports related to the stops 

• • Click on Add transfer placeholder
  • Click Done
  • Click Save
  • Click Back

• Go to the Flight Configuration tab
• Select Fixed as the flight configuration
• Add the Outbound/Inbound flights (described here)
• Click Save

• Go to the Miscellaneous tab
• Regenerate the Availability of Template
• Click Save
• Publish the template

At this point, when the template is instantiated in the available date, all three flights are shown at the Planner level, specifically in the Main trip and Transports tabs.

Connecting Flights within Individual trips

In this scenario, inventory flights can be added to an itinerary via flight search in the Planner. For this, some pre-conditions must apply:

• Outbound/Inbound flights exist in the Inventory
• Connecting flight exists in the Inventory
• Individual trip has a flight placeholder between the stops

To add a placeholder in an Individual trip at the Planner level:

• On Edit Route / Plan Your Trip page, define the transport as a flight OR
• On the Main Trip tab, click on Adjust to change the transfer type to Flight

To associate inventory flights to the itinerary at the Planner level:

• Go to the Transports tab
• Write the Departure airport (same as the one defined in the Outbound flight)
• Click Search so that the Outbound/Inbound and Connecting flights are shown

• Click on Select to add the flights to the itinerary

Booking change handling

Inventory flights added to a template with a Fixed flight configuration can not be replaced or removed at the Planner level (as described in this article).

However, if a booking change is triggered, the user can Replace the previous inventory flights for different existing inventory flights (of the same availability) OR for live offers. Flights can also be removed at this point.

This functionality also applies to Connecting (or Multi-city) flights.