FASTTRAK Cloud Transponet Integration Guide (September 18th, 2015)
Setting up your Transponet Credentials in FASTTRAK
Once you obtain your Transponet credentials from Deem, you need to set them up in FASTTRAK in order to enable the integration.
During the entry of the credentials, the system will ask you for a default Customer account to link to the Transponet account. The reason for this is to give FASTTRAK a baseline for the incoming reservations. In Transponet integrations, this Customer will never be booked on as the integration will create Customers it cannot find. This differs from raw WSP integrations. In cases where an incoming reservation is not able to be determined to be coming from a known source, and a new customer profile record is created in FASTTRAK, the integration will use the pricing plan that is linked to this default Customer for the new customer. Therefore, it is recommended that your default Customer use your Default Pricing plan, or other rack rate pricing plan you have created that is generic to your organization. Any customer account the integration tries to create must have at least enough information from Transponet to pass FASTTRAK’s validation. Passenger Last Name, and a Passenger Phone #. If not, the booking will land on your default Customer tied to the integration account.
Now go create your default Customer account for the Transponet setup in Ultimate or Express. Name it generically, such as “Transponet Default” or something similar.
FASTTRAK Ultimate: the entry screen is located in System Global Settings -> Internet Services & eAffiliate tab -> Web Service User & GPS Setup sub-tab. There is a “Transponet Account Setup box near the bottom”. Click the “Setup Transponet Credentials” button to enter your credentials to enable them to work with FASTTRAK.
Express: In the Gear icon on the upper left, System Global Settings, scroll down to the area called “Web Service Portal (WSP) User Setup & eAffiliate Vehicle Types”. Click the “WSP User Setup” red hyperlink. On the next page, click the “Add Transponet Credentials” button.
Transponet Client Account Configuration: Setting up your Customers and Corporate Accounts
You may be receiving reservations via Transponet for specific Customers or Corporate accounts. If so, the problem exists of how to properly map those within FASTTRAK.
*** If you are taking general reservations from Transponet only, and it does not matter how they come in in terms of which target Customer account(s) and Corporate relationships, then you can largely skip this section. This is not common. ***
When setting up your account with Transponet, you can have reservations from specific corporate accounts or customers arrive to you specifying a certain value to help identify them in FASTTRAK.
The Transponet fields that the integration uses are below. The setup of these values is done with Transponet/Deem, not FASTTRAK:
Accounting.CorporateID – This field is key in a Transponet integration dealing with corporate accounts. It is technically optional, but is commonly used. It is alphanumeric, and can be anything you want it to be, you will tell Deem/Transponet what to use for this. For example, if you have a SONY corporate account, you can have Deem submit “SONY” as a value in this field for all incoming SONY reservations, in order to classify them.
In FASTTRAK, Transponet’s Accounting.CorporateID translates in 2 places:
- Customer Profile “Account Number”
- Corporate Profile “Account Number”
When the booking arrives via the integration tagged with “SONY” in this example, the system will try and match up the incoming reservation to an existing Customer in your system in order to book the reservation on that customer account. If matching fails, a NEW Customer will be added.
When Customer Profiles are found with the Account Number of “SONY” in this example, the system will try and figure out which particular customer is the match if more than 1 is found. It does this by comparing these things in addition to Account Number:
- First Name
- Last Name
- E-mail Address (only if multiple customers are found with the same exact first and last name)
If no definitive match is able to be made to an existing Customer account in your system, the Transponet integration will create a new Customer profile record on which to book the incoming reservation. When this happens, the system will then try and auto-link this new customer to a Corporate Profile. If there is a single Corporate Profile record in your database with “SONY” in the Account Number field in this example, it will do this for you. This is valuable if you are using a Corporate Pricing plan as that link will happen automatically for you.
*** Note that NEW customers created as a result of this process, and linked to the corporate account SONY in this example, will be set to Use Corporate Pricing, and to Bill the Corporate Account (the two checkboxes on Customer Profile in FASTTRAK). As such, it is likely you will want to have your SONY account in this example, using some pricing plan specific to Sony if you want custom pricing in effect for the client.
Affiliate Connect
If you are receiving reservations from an affiliate via Transponet Affiliate Connect, and want ALL reservations to land on ONE specific Customer account in FASTTRAK, you must enter your Affiliate’s “member code” into the Account Number field in FASTTRAK on the desired Customer profile, and check the “Single Transponet Booking Account Catch-all (allow all jobs to land on this account)” check box.
Accounting.UDF.CorporateProfileID – This is an optional field that you can ask Deem/Transponet to provide . It is not as commonly used as the scenario above, however, it can provide very solid data to link newly created customer profiles in FASTTRAK to a specific corporate profile. In this scenario, you can open the Corporate Profile record in question in FASTTRAK, and look at the read-only Corporate ID box. That numeric value is what you can give to Deem/Transponet for this particular Transponet field. This is used to definitively try and link incoming Customers to the Corporate Account rather than relying on “Account Number” as described in the section above.
Accounting.UDF.CostCenter – This is an optional field that you can ask Deem/Transponet to provide for certain accounts when bookings are submitted to you. It translates directly to “Cost Center” on your FASTTRAK reservation. Used for your tracking purposes only, it is simply a pass-through of data.
Transponet Non-Corporate Bookings, or bookings that failed to find a Customer match
Any booking that is received that goes through the above process, and no definitive match can be made for the sake of identifying the customer, will go through one last match attempt in your Customer list. In this case, e-mail address of the incoming passenger, if provided, will be used to search your Customers in FASTTRAK to try and match an account. E-mail address is a unique field in FASTTRAK, which makes this match relatively conclusive.
Pricing in the Transponet Integration
The integration uses your pricing as configured in FASTTRAK, as with any booking made in FASTTRAK. The source of the pricing will depend entirely on the targeted Customer Profile in FASTTRAK that the booking is made on. Fixed/Zone pricing match attempts will be made if the incoming Transponet reservation is not specified to be Hourly. The success of the Fixed/Zone pricing queries will only be as good as your pricing data containing the incoming From and To locations, in the plan that is on the targeted Customer or its linked Corporate Account.
As indicated in the sections above, extensive attempts are made to identify incoming reservations for known/existing customers. When a match is found, the pricing returned will be a result of the Customer Profile’s settings as is normally the case in FASTTRAK. Most commonly in Corporate account scenarios, the Customer will be set to use the Corporate account’s pricing plan.
Important: The main caveat to be aware of here is that when a booking comes in, and no Customer account match is able to be made, along with no Corporate account linking being able to be done (linking SONY Corporate Profile in the example above)… the New Customer that is created will end up being assigned to use the pricing plan that is specified on the default Customer account you selected when setting up the Transponet Credentials in FASTTRAK or Express. This becomes the only logical conclusion to make electronically, when all other attempts to identify the Customer and/or Corporate Profiles for the booking fail.
NOTE: There is a field on the FASTTRAK Customer Profile called “DO NOT return hourly pricing to Transponet if fixed/zone pricing unavailable”. During rate quote operations, if the target customer has this option activated, and no fixed/zone (flat) pricing is found, the system will return a $0 value rate. During ride operations, the system will price the reservation as $0 as well. It is assumed on the Transponet side that these reservations would be priced as per any corporate agreements, etc.
System Customer Matching Logic Overview
1) New reservation comes in from transponet.
2) If the reservation has a Deem Accounting.CorporateID, the system considers that the Account #. Period.
3) AFFILIATE CONNECT: IF the reservation does NOT have an Accounting.CorporateID as indicated in #2, AND it has a remote BookerMemberCode, we consider that the Account #. BookerMemberCode is for AffiliateConnect and it’s the remote farming affiliate’s unique Transponet ID.
4) If there is an Account # from the logic above in #2 or #3, the system does the following (if not, skip to #5):
- Search FT customer list for Account #. If there is ONE matching customer profile, AND that profile has the “Single Transponet Booking Account Catch-all (allow all jobs to land on this account)” checkbox CHECKED, book on it always. End of process.
- Search FT customer list for Account #. If there is ONE matching profile, AND that profile DOES NOT have the “Single Transponet Booking Account Catch-all (allow all jobs to land on this account)” checkbox CHECKED, then use the profile ONLY if the Transponet passenger first name and last name match the Customer Profile in EXACTLY. If so, end of process, if not skip to #6.
- If we get more than 1 profile matching the account # from the searches above, and still have not found the matching customer, first see if ANY of the profiles are marked as “Single Transponet Booking Account Catch-all (allow all jobs to land on this account)”. If so, use it, end of process. If multiple customer profiles are flagged in this way for the same account #, the system is going to use the first one it finds as this is not a valid scenario and it is impossible to guess correctly.
- If none of the above are true, and there are more than 1 customer profiles, then loop through the profiles looking for an EXACT first and last name match. If the system finds ONE customer, use it, end of process. Note that if there are more than 1 first and last name matches (like a John Smith), then one must also match E-mail address in addition. If no customer profile has been determined at this point, skip to #6.
5) If there is NO account # provided, we search on the full passenger first and last name. If there is ONE hit in the customer profile, use it, if not proceed to next step.
6) If there is still NO customer profile to book on, the system now creates a NEW CUSTOMER PROFILE. IF there is an account # via all the logic above, search the FT CORPORATE record looking for ONE corporate profile. If found, the system will link the customer to that corporate billing account and set the customer to use corp pricing and use corp billing.