Quick Start for Travel API Consumers

Welcome to the quick start guide for travel industry API consumers. This concise guide is designed to give you a streamlined overview of Pliant's API capabilities, allowing you to leverage our products effectively and quickly. Remember, you don't have to implement every feature. Even utilizing just a couple of endpoints can significantly enhance your processes.

Step 1: Define your Setup

Contact your Pliant representative to set up a demo organization in our sandbox. Inform us if you need:

• Specialized travel purchasing cards.
• A single, technical cardholder to issue cards.
  • You can still provide dynamic cardholder names per card you issue.
• Custom fields at the card level for tailored usage, which get copied onto every transaction made with that card.

Step 2: Select Organization and Cardholder

In order to issue a card you need to know to which cardholder you want to issue the card. Each cardholder is part of an organization. Hence you can select first the organization and then the cardholder from our list endpoints. You can then issue a card for this particular cardholder.

Alternatively you can of course configure fixed values you want to use, if you always issue for the same organization-cardholder pair. You can get those values as well from the list endpoints or the web app.

Step 3: Start Issuing Cards

Use POST /cards/{cardholderId}/instant to issue cards instantly. Hint: check GET /cards/available-cards to select the correct cardConfig.

This endpoint allows you to:

• Set card validity parameters (fixed dates or ranges like 3 months).
• Limit the number of transactions per card from 1..n.
• Define limits and renew frequencies.
• Include custom names in cardholder properties to issue a card in the name of a passenger etc.
• Use card controls to limit usage to specific merchants, payment categories, dates and/or times.
• Assign custom field values or default values to automatically tag transactions with your ids.

The endpoint is designed to set up all this in one single call.

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Available Card Configurations

When issuing a card it's necessary to provide a card config. Make sure to check GET /cards/available-cards to select the correct cardConfig.

Step 4: Access Sensitive Card Data

Upon successful card issuance you can fetch the cards sensitive data like the PAN and CVV. If you as a company are PCI-DSS compliant, use the API endpoint GET /card-details/{cardId}. Otherwise you can integrate our secure web widget.

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Combining Card Issuing and Sensitive Card Data in One Call

You can also issue a new credit card and (in the same call) retrieve the sensitive card data in the response. Use our Instant-PCI endpoint for this.

Step 5: Reconciliation & Administration

For transaction and payment reconciliation, we offer various methods, including callbacks, monthly statements or customised CSV files tailored to your needs.

We recommend to make use of our callbacks for the transaction entity, which gives you full flexibility and near-real-time data:

• TRANSACTION_AUTHORIZED: Triggered whenever a transaction is AUTHORIZED.
• TRANSACTION_CONFIRMED: Triggered whenever a transaction is CONFIRMED.

In addition to that, our comprehensive web app can handle various administrative tasks, allowing you to focus on automating card issuance and reconciliation processes.

Optional: Add Card Controls to Limit Usage of Card

Optionally you can add card controls to any card to specify allow or block lists for card usage. For instance: allow only hotels and airlines and block everything else.

If you use our specific travel card product, we pre-configured reasonable allow lists.