Affiliate bookings for car rental companies

Boost your partners bookings with the new IOS Rentals 3.5

Affiliates can become to a car rental company its best sellers. They can be hotels, tour offices, other car rental companies, or other professionals. To attract these people become a partner of yours you can provide them a discount. IOS Rentals 3.5 improved a lot the way it handles affiliates by automating the booking process through them. Also IOS Rentals 3.5 has an improved IOS Sync implementation and new endpoints to the API system.

Affiliates and discount coupons

When you add or edit an affiliate you can now assign a discount coupon to him. If you do so, then this coupon gets locked to be used only by affiliates. No one else can use it even if he knows the coupon code. The same coupon can be assigned to multiple affiliates if you want. This way you can have special discounts for affiliates.

But how IOS Rentals plugin detects an affiliate? IOS Rentals plugin is installed on Wordpress, Elxis, Joomla (not fully supported), or other CMS. When the user is logged-in in the CMS, IOS Rentals plugin loads automatically his local account details and checks his email address. If it finds an affiliate with the same email address then it matches the user with that affiliate account. So, to be able for a user to be detected as an affiliate the user must login and must have the same email as the one configured in IOS Rentals dashboard. And what about standalone PHP plugin implementations? In this case you can provide current user affiliate ID as a PHP constant (IOSRT_AFFID). Contact us if you need more help with this.

When the plugin detects an affiliate it displays him his discount coupon in booking form and prompts him to apply for the discount. After the booking process is complete the reservation has automatically been assigned to the affiliate in IOS Rentals platform. From within IOS Rentals you can easily find which reservations has been performed by an affiliate.

New endpoints and data in IOS Rentals API

Endpoint bookings added to the IOS Rentals XML/JSON API. Via this endpoint you can search existing reservations and retrieve them remotely. IOS Rentals supports many search options. You can search reservations by: reservation ID (rid), reservation code (rescode), reservation date, reservation status, pick-up location, pick-up date, return location, return date, group ID, model ID, vehicle ID, vehicle type, affiliate ID, customer email. So, you can, for example, get a list of reservations for June 24, or you can get all the reservations for motorcycles having pick-up location Paros port. You can provide any combination of the supported search options. The API will return a maximum of 100 results in chronological order (newer first). If you have more than 100 results you can provide the page option for the next 100 results (page=2, page=3, etc). Note that the API will not return sensitive customer information such as credit card details.

<?php 
//Example: Get list of reservations made on 2025-01-15
$api_id = 'AAAAAAAAAAAA'; //API id to use
$cfgoptions = array();

define('_IOSRTAPICLIENT_', 1);
require_once('/path/to/client/client.class.php');
$client = new iosrtApiClient($api_id, $cfgoptions);

$helper = $client->getHelper();
$bookings = $helper->bookingsRequest(array('resdate' => '2025-01-15'));
?>

<?php 
//Example: Get list of reservations made on 2025-01-15
$api_id = 'AAAAAAAAAAAA'; //API id to use
$cfgoptions = array();

define('_IOSRTAPICLIENT_', 1);
require_once('/path/to/client/client.class.php');
$client = new iosrtApiClient($api_id, $cfgoptions);

$helper = $client->getHelper();
$bookings = $helper->bookingsRequest(array('resdate' => '2025-01-15'));
?>

in IOS Rentals 3.5 you can also fetch via the API the list of all existing affiliates. There is no a special endpoint for this. Affiliates list is part of the basic endpoint.

<?php 
$affiliates = $helper->basicRequest('affiliates');
?>

<?php 
$affiliates = $helper->basicRequest('affiliates');
?>

To detect if the current CMS user is an affiliate get his affiliate ID with method getAffiliateID and check if it is an integer greater than 0. In this case you can get affiliate information by using the getAffiliate method. getAffiliate will return information like firstname, lastname, phone, mobile, email, assigned coupon and more.

<?php 
$affid = $client->getAffiliateID();
if ($affid > 0) {
    $affiliate = $client->getAffiliate();
}
?>

<?php 
$affid = $client->getAffiliateID();
if ($affid > 0) {
    $affiliate = $client->getAffiliate();
}
?>

Multiple IOS Sync classes

You can now upload different CRF files for IOS Sync with different class names which are able to run simultaneously. You do so by adding a class suffix to the iosSyncHandler class name. The suffix can be a single character within the A-Z range. Example for company with ID 5: class iosSyncHandler5B implements iosSyncHandler.

Manual IOS Sync synchronization

When a reservation is not yet synchronized automatically (or if you have no automatic synchronization) you can manually synchronize it (send it to third parties) by clicking a button in the reservations listing page.

New extensions available

• Plugin Affiliate bookings: Detects if the current user is an affiliate and if yes displays to him a list of his reservations. Available as a plugin for Elxis and Wordpress.
• Module Affiliate: Detects if the current user is an affiliate and if yes displays to him a welcome message, his discount and his coupon code. Available as a module for Elxis.

Other changes in IOS Rentals 3.5

See affiliates fee in affiliates list. Default currency is returned in company API basic data. Fix registered colours in editable group prices calendar. Fix counting error in Settings > season tolerance.

Read also

• Syncronize reservations with IOS Sync - IOS Rentals 3.4
• Rating, reviews and templates - IOS Rentals 3.2
• Rental price depending on driver's age - IOS Rentals 3.1
• How to install IOS Rentals?
• IOS Rentals v2.9 and v2.8

Next article

Syncronize reservations with IOS Sync - IOS Rentals 3.4