Overview
The Price Integrity Policy is supplemental to Skyscanner’s Partner Policy. The purpose of the Price Integrity Policy at Skyscanner is to guarantee a smooth and trustworthy end-to-end journey for users interacting with your pricing on Skyscanner - from their initial click on Skyscanner, to partner websites, right through to the checkout process. We assess price integrity according to the criteria outlined below.
Skyscanner requires partners’ API connections to include all price components that travellers will incur for a stay. This includes the base rate, but also all reasonably estimable taxes & fees that a user ill need to pay from the moment of booking until departure- regardless of whether the sum is collected by the partner or the property. Examples of this include, but are not limited to, resort fees, city taxes, etc.
Partners are expected to appropriately categorize each price component in their API response to enable Skyscanner to ensure accurate price breakdowns can be displayed in the relevant markets (e.g., tax-exclusive for Base Rate markets, tax-inclusive for All-In markets, etc.). Skyscanner maintains, on a market-by-market basis, a list of which categories each market falls into. Given the changing demand of customers and regulators, Skyscanner’s maintenance of this list requires that partners appropriately label all base rates, and taxes and fees as per our API integrations.
Skyscanner must be capable of evaluating partner price integrity through standard, end-to-end booking simulations without necessitating the provision of personal information such as email addresses or phone numbers.
Pricing Criteria
- This is just the price for the room, and is exclusive of all taxes, fees, service charges, etc.
- The base rate sent to Skyscanner must align with the base rate presented to the user during checkout.
- Rates should be for an entire night's stay. Hourly or day-use rates are proscribed and will be eliminated.
- The manipulation of price breakdowns by reducing the base rate while augmenting taxes and/or fees is forbidden, and widespread infractions may lead to campaign deactivations.
- Minor discrepancies in price due to currency exchange or rounding are anticipated.
Taxes & Fees
Skyscanner urges partners to include all taxes & fees itemized in their API responses to ensure equitable treatment of all elements. This encompasses universally applicable expenses such as:
- Local Taxes & fees paid in advance (at booking)
- National Taxes paid in advance (at booking)
- Partner Fees paid in advance (at booking), including traditional Service Fees
- Resort Fees paid on-site (during the stay)
- Local Taxes and fees paid on-site (during the stay)
- National Taxes paid on-site (during the stay)
- Resort Fees paid in advance (at booking)
- City Taxes paid on-site (during the stay)
- Compulsory Transfer Fees (for example, at resorts)
Price Integrity Report and Online Dashboard
Skyscanner is in the process of developing a partner price integrity report that will be made available to partners via email as well as via our online partner portal. This price integrity report will serve to document all partner price observations, positive or negative, to ensure the partner has feedback on their price accuracy performance.
The price integrity report will contribute to a quality score that will be used by our machine learning algorithms to determine prominence for any given partner and their offers in our hotel partner sort.
The details of both the reporting and the score and its impact on sorting will be outlined in a subsequent release of this document in Q4 2024.