We are happy to announce our latest TripBuilder release. Please see these release notes for the most significant changes. Let us know if you have any questions, feedback, or ideas for features or improvements!

We have resolved an issue where Planner Copilot could lose track of the originally selected destination when users refined their trip with short follow-up prompts (e.g., “2 adults, November 15”). Previously, this could result in the system suggesting a new or incorrect destination, causing confusion and extra work for users.

We are now able to reliably maintain the user’s originally specified destination across all subsequent prompts, regardless of how concise or specific the follow-up input is.

The Global Recommended Hotels feature now works seamlessly with template-level hotel recommendations, providing a broader selection of recommended accommodations.

What's new:

In the upcoming sprint, a prioritisation enhancement will be implemented to increase the priority of Template Recommendations when instantiating the itinerary.

Note: The New Hotel Search experience is currently in public beta.

We've enhanced the flight booking process to handle expired offers more intelligently. When you select flights and then spend time planning other aspects of your trip before finalising your booking, the system now automatically ensures your flight selection remains valid.

What's new: When checking flight availability before booking, if your selected offer is older than 10 minutes, the system automatically searches for the same flight again to verify current pricing and availability. This prevents booking failures caused by expired offers from suppliers like Aerticket API Hub, whose offers typically expire after 15 minutes.

How it works:

Expected benefits:

Scope:

We've resolved an issue where hotels appeared multiple times in search results when available from different suppliers with streaming enabled.

What's Fixed

What You'll Experience

This improvement affects live hotel searches with streaming enabled and ensures you see a comprehensive view of hotel options without confusion from duplicate entries.

We've extended our transit activity supplier notification system to include flight information. Supplier notification emails now include flight departure and arrival locations, departure and arrival times, marketing carrier flight number and name, and flight class information when available. These enhancements apply to all transit activity email triggers, including booking requests, confirmations, changes, and cancellations.

This improvement ensures transit activity suppliers have a complete flight context for both inbound and outbound travel, enabling better coordination of ground services, passenger assistance, and transfer logistics.

A new feature flag has been introduced in this release to prepare for the upcoming Natural Language Search (NLS) capability, which will enter Beta testing next sprint.

The NLS feature will allow users with the New Hotel Search enabled to perform intuitive natural language queries directly in the Hotel Drawer. Instead of traditional filters and parameters, users will be able to search using conversational phrases like "3 to 4 hotel stars".

This feature flag is currently inactive and serves as a preparatory configuration for the Beta rollout. No action is required at this time.

Note: NLS functionality requires the New Hotel Search feature to be enabled.

Enhanced location resolution to prevent incorrect matches and support ad-hoc locations (i.e., locations that only exist in the itinerary and have no equivalent in the managed area database):

With these improvements, integration with Generative AI clients becomes much simpler overall. In this sense, also Planner Copilot will leverage and profit from this improvement.

Itineraries created via the from-prompt endpoint of the Itinerary API do not show substitution warnings anymore in the planner because in the use case of the from-prompt endpoint, the user hasn’t seen the proposed hotels by the AI and therefore, there is no point in showing notifications that AI-proposed hotels were replaced by substitutes due to missing availability.

Additionally, it now accurately maps AI-suggested transportation modes to itinerary segments. Previously, the API could recommend impractical options—such as rental cars for international or cross-country routes—leading to confusing or unworkable itineraries.

With this update, the endpoint only suggests rental cars where it is feasible and appropriate (e.g., within the same country or region), and correctly applies trains or flights for longer or international connections as recommended by the AI.

The Connect API activities search endpoint now includes the itinerary ID in the request metadata. This enhancement enables better tracking and processing of activity search results throughout the booking workflow.

What's new: Itinerary ID is now available in the metadata of activity search responses.

We've enhanced our API rate limiting to ensure optimal performance and fair access for all users. A new network-level protection has been added for specific resource-intensive endpoints:

These limits are designed to accommodate normal business operations, including corporate networks with shared IP addresses. Rate limits apply per endpoint - reaching a limit on one endpoint doesn't affect access to others. Requests exceeding limits receive an HTTP 429 response.

For complete details: https://help.tripbuilder.app/en/articles/415227-api-rate-limiting