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Using Hostaway Webhooks

Robert
  • Updated

Webhooks

  • Webhook is a powerful tool to have Hostaway software send reservation data to 3rd party software providers with webhook support
  • When you set up the webhook for your 3rd party software, some will require getting an example of the reservation data to complete the setup. You can create the webhook in Hostaway and set the URL in this 3rd party software
  • After this, you can make a "fake" direct booking in Hostaway under the reservations menu. This will send the data approximately 5-10 minutes later to the 3rd party so you can complete the setup
  • To test webhooks and how they look in the payload, you can use this website.

 

Unified Webhook

Before the 1st of April 2022,  we had two webhooks - one for reservations and another one for guest messages. We released a new version that is known as the unified webhook and has the following advantages:

  1. Only need to subscribe to one webhook to receive updates.

  2. The unified webhook triggers more events than the previous reservations webhook.

 

The unified webhook will trigger in the following cases

  1. Message received from the guest

    • Messaging webhooks are only triggered for guest messages, not for host messages

  2. Reservation status changed (New, Modified, Cancelled, etc)

  3. The reservation listing changed from one listing to another

  4. Payment status changed. Paid charges that do not update the payment status do not trigger the webhook. If the charge changes the payment status (e.g., from unpaid to partially paid, or from partially paid to paid) the webhook is triggered

  5. Reservation dates/times changed

  6. Total price changed

  7. Door code changed

 

If the following conditions are not met, the webhook will not work

Hostaway checks 4 things in URLs when you add/update the URL of the unified webhooks in this order:

  1. If the URL is valid. Constraints are here
  2. If the host of the URL is in an internal network, for security purposes, to prevent access to any internal application
  3. If the scheme of the URL is one of these supported schemes:
    1. HTTP
    2. HTTPS (recommended)
  4. If the port (if it is given) of the URL is one of these supported ports:
    80 (default HTTP port)
    443 (default https port)

 

Using the unified webhook

  1. Log in as the admin account owner to your Hostaway Dashboard
  2. Go to menu settings > Integrations
  3. Add the Webhook URL for the webhook that should be addressed.
  4. Optionally select listings and channels, and if needed, protect them with a username and password

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Important notes to consider:

  • The webhook will trigger as soon as the most relevant data is ready. In some cases, you may see that complex fields and data that come in later are not provided at that time. We keep improving the webhook to provide more data in the payloads as well, over time.
  • When using universal webhooks in combination with public API, consider calling the API afterward to retrieve updated details not included in the webhook, where needed.
  • We plan to release a public API endpoint to create and update webhooks by the end of 2022.

To be depreciated during the year 2024:

  • At this moment, Hostaway also supports the 2 older webhook versions under the Reservation-specific and Messages-specific webhook modules, as well as in the API documentation
  • These webhook systems are scheduled to be removed in 2024, when all clients will be asked to migrate to the new universal webhook system
  • We recommend starting to use the universal webhook system in any new application built or connected.


What to do when you receive a notification about a webhook failure:

1. Go to "Settings > Integrations", scroll down on the page to the webhook section, and click on "Logs":


2. Click on the button to export the CSV

3. Open the CSV file on your computer and filter by Object ID (which is the reservation ID) and see what is stated in the "Response body" field. 

If all goes well, it will say "200"; it is an error provided by the third-party software you are integrating via webhook, and you'll need to reach out to the third-party software to ask why such an error happened

Disclaimer: If a webhook fails for more than 5 days, Hostaway may automatically disable it to protect system stability.
 

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