Car rental quick guide

Follow this quick guide to start playing with our Car rental API collection in your client application.

This quick guide shows the minimum steps needed to integrate the Demand API car rental endpoints in the Search and look flow.

Before you start

Before you start, make sure you’ve completed the prerequisites. You’ll need:

✓ A valid API key token.
✓ Your X-Affiliate-Id
✓ Open the try out console.

Use case

This use case represents a typical Cars API scenario:

A traveller visiting your website wants to add car rental for their upcoming holiday in Edinburgh, Scotland.

They want to book a medium sized car for 8 days.

The traveller is in the Netherlands and is using your website from their mobile phone.

To get familiar with the Car API flow and the endpoints involved, take this use case as an example in every step of this guide.

Step 1 - Search for vehicles

→ Use the /search request to let travellers search for car rentals and look at the price and list of available vehicles for the route they are interested on.

Search request

These are the key parameters to create your search request (valid for both 3.1 and 3.2 versions).

For the provided use case you should create a request body similar to this example:

{
  "booker": {
    "country": "nl"
  },
  "currency": "EUR",
  "driver": {
    "age": 36
  },
  "route": {
    "pickup": {
      "datetime": "2026-09-01T10:00:00",
      "location": {
        "airport": "EDI"
      }
    },
    "dropoff": {
      "datetime": "2024-09-08T11:05:00",
      "location": {
        "airport": "EDI"
      }
    }
  }
}

Example with latitude and longitude coordinates:

{
  "booker": {
    "country": "nl"
  },
  "currency": "EUR",
  "driver": {
    "age": 36
  },
  "route": {
    "pickup": {
      "datetime": "2026-09-01T10:00:00",
      "location": {
        "coordinates": {
          "latitude": 52.309456,
          "longitude": 4.762266
        }
      }
    },
    "dropoff": {
      "datetime": "2026-09-08T11:05:00",
      "location": {
        "coordinates": {
          "latitude": 52.309456,
          "longitude": 4.762266
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

→ Try it yourself

The response contains a list of vehicles that match the specified search criteria. For each vehicle in the list, the response contains:

Step 2 - Retrieve car details

Before you show the search results to the traveller, you need to get additional content about each vehicle, the supplier and the depot(s).

You can do it in two different ways:

a) Using the stored static data.

b) Alternatively you can call the static data endpoints:

Step 3 - Display your search results page

You now have the necessary information to display the search results to the traveller.

Use data from both the cars/search and car/details responses to provide the level of detail suited to your business needs.

Recommendations

Limiting the number of results

To improve the search experience, consider limiting the maximum number of results displayed.

{
  "last_modified": "2024-12-01T11:05:00+00:00",
  "maximum_results": 100
}

Keeping content up-to-date

For static content (e.g., data from the car/details endpoint), we recommend checking the last_modified timestamp to ensure the information is up-to-date.

Show supplier logo

When displaying supplier results, consider showing the supplier’s logo alongside their name.

This helps travellers easily recognise the supplier and makes their decision-making process smoother.

Display scores

We also recommend showing the total score, as well as the breakdown of scores for each depot, on the search results page.

This can significantly aid the traveller in their booking decision.

Step 4 - Redirect the traveller to complete the booking

After a traveller has chosen the vehicle they want to book, you should redirect them to the URL (either app or web link) returned in your /search response.

1. Go to the /search response.
2. Copy the returned Booking URL.
3. Redirect the traveller to the selected URL.

For example:

"url": {
  "app": "booking://search?affiliate_id=xxxxx&driver_age=25&do_time=2024-06-22T10:00&do_loc_iata=MAN&pu_time=2024-06-20T10:00&pu_loc_iata=LHR&pu_loc_name=London+Heathrow+Airport&expand_search=false",
  "web": "https://cars.booking.com/search-results?vehicleId=699340901&vehicleInfo.vehicle.id=699340901&aid=xxxxxxx&prefcurrency=USD&preflang=en&driversAge=25&doHour=10&doMinute=0&doDay=22&doMonth=6&doYear=2024&dropLocationIata=MAN&puHour=10&puMinute=0&puDay=20&puMonth=6&puYear=2024&locationIata=LHR&locationName=London+Heathrow+Airport"
}