Create an accommodation order via Booking.com's Demand API using the preview-token-create flow, and correctly handle order-creation errors/retries.
domain: developers.booking.com · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Call POST /orders/preview with booker, accommodation.id/checkin/checkout, and accommodation.products[].id + allocation (guest counts) to validate guest allocation, get the final price breakdown, and receive an order_token — note this token expires after 15 minutes.
Show the traveller a preview page (price, cancellation policy, payment options) from the /orders/preview response before proceeding.
Call POST /orders/create with the order_token plus required booker, accommodation.products[].guests[], and payment fields; all Demand API v3.x endpoints only accept POST (a GET returns HTTP 405).
If /orders/create returns HTTP 409 with id 'order_unavailable', it means the product became unavailable between preview and create — re-check via /accommodations/availability and offer the traveller an alternative rather than retrying the same payload.
If the order_token has expired (create fails referencing an expired token), repeat /orders/preview to obtain a fresh token rather than reusing the old one.
On HTTP 429, back off exponentially (e.g. 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s) rather than retrying immediately or on a fixed interval.
Known gotchas
There is no general-purpose idempotency key for accommodation orders/create — the documented 'duplicate_request' 409 response (which tells you to fetch the existing booking via /orders/details instead of retrying) is explicitly scoped in Booking.com's own error docs to car rentals only, so don't assume the same automatic dedup applies to hotel orders.
The order_token from /orders/preview is single-use and short-lived (15 min); it is not a generic idempotency key, it's a session token that encapsulates the whole order so orders/create doesn't need the price rebuilt.
Every request needs Accept: application/json and Content-Type: application/json explicitly — missing these produce 406/415 errors even though JSON is the only supported format.
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