In today’s highly competitive travel industry market, it is no longer sufficient to only display the lowest available fare. Today’s traveleres demands fare comparisons, flexibility, and an understanding of value differences before making a purchase decision.
This scenario has led to branded fare merchandising becoming a vital revenue driver for airlines and a conversion driver for OTAs. Travel sites that effectively display fare families such as Economy Value, Economy Flex, and Business have seen increased average order value and customer satisfaction.
In the Amadeus Quick Connect API framework, the Flight Offers Upsell API endpoint makes this possible. This allows travel sites to display enhanced fare options for the same journey after the initial search, which is an important layer of advanced Amadeus AQC API integration.
For CTOs, backend developers, and travel product strategists developing a scalable Flight API for OTA, this upsell step is crucial for maximizing both user experience and revenue.
The Flight Offers Upsell API is designed to retrieve branded fare alternatives for an already selected flight itinerary.
Instead of returning different flights, the API returns different commercial fare families for the same flight. This allows your platform to present meaningful upgrade options to travelers.
Core Purpose
The API helps your Amadeus flight booking API implementation:
In simple terms, this API powers the “Select your fare” screen in modern OTA booking flows.
Each upsell response returns commercially unique flight offers that may vary in:
Even though the flight timings remain the same, the commercial value proposition changes significantly.
This capability is only possible because of deep airline connectivity enabled through GDS API integration.
Within a standard Amadeus AQC API integration flow, the upsell step sits between search and final pricing.
High level sequence:
Because this article focuses on upsell behavior, the key takeaway is: The Upsell API only enhances an existing flight offer - it does not discover new flights.
From a technical perspective, the upsell flow is deterministic and stateless, but it requires strict payload integrity.
Before invoking this endpoint, your system must already be authenticated via Amadeus OAuth2 authentication and must possess a valid flight offer from the search step.
1. Start with a Valid Flight Offer
Your backend must first call Flight Offers Search and store the full flight-offer object.
Important rules:
This is one of the most common failure points in Flight booking API for OTA implementations.
2. Call the Upsell Endpoint
Your system sends:
Behind the scenes, the Amadeus Quick Connect API:
3. Receive Multiple Branded Offers
The response typically contains several upsell options such as:
Each option is returned as a fully bookable flight-offer object.
4. Present Fare Comparison to Users
Your UI should clearly highlight value differences rather than only price differences.
High-performing OTAs typically display:
5. Pass Selected Offer to Pricing
Once the traveler selects a fare family, the chosen upsell offer must be sent unchanged to the pricing API.
Never reconstruct or partially rebuild the offer - always persist the full JSON.
Sample Request(Conceptual)
Below is a simplified conceptual structure to illustrate the request flow:
1POST /v2/shopping/flight-offers/upselling23{4 "data" : {5 "type" : "flight-offers-upselling",6 "flightOffers" : [ { ...full actual offer... } ]7 }8}9
Key reminder: The full flight offer must be included exactly as received from search.
Sample Response (Conceptual)
1{2 "meta": { "count": 3 },3 "data": [4 { "id": "3", "type": "flight-offer", "...": "..." },5 { "id": "4", "type": "flight-offer", "...": "..." }6 ]7}8
What this means:
Ready for pricing and booking
Even experienced teams face issues when implementing the upsell layer. Below are the most frequent pitfalls observed in real-world GDS API integration projects.
1. Modifying the Original Flight Offer
Problem: Developers sometimes normalize or trim the search response before sending it to upsell.
Impact:
Best practice:
2. Ignoring Ticketing Time Limit (TTL)
Upsell is only valid if the base offer is still within its last ticketing date.
Failure scenario:
Recommended approach:
3. Weak Fare Comparison UI
Many OTAs technically integrate upsell but fail commercially because the UI does not clearly communicate value.
Common mistakes:
High-conversion strategy:
Fare merchandising with branded fare products is no longer a choice. Airlines are increasingly using fare families to differentiate their products and generate ancillary revenue.
Platforms that fully exploit the upsell functionality through Amadeus Quick Connect API will typically deliver:
For travel businesses investing in serious GDS API integration, the upsell layer is a strategic differentiator - not just a technical add-on.
The Flight Offers Upsell API is a very powerful but often overlooked part of the Amadeus AQC API integration platform. Although the search phase reveals flights, the upsell phase makes available the actual value of branded fare, which is the only way to achieve true commercial optimization.
If done properly, this API allows OTAs and agencies to provide airline-level merchandising experiences, enhance conversion rates, and maximize the value of bookings while remaining fully compatible with the overall Amadeus flight booking API integration process.
Planning to integrate Amadeus Quick Connect (AQC) APIs into your travel platform? Our experienced Amadeus API integration experts help you implement secure authentication, flight search, pricing, booking and ticketing workflows end to end. Contact us today to accelerate your Amadeus integration.
It retrieves branded fare options for the same flight itinerary returned by Flight Offers Search. This allows OTAs to show fare families like Economy Flex or Business and drive upsell conversions.
No. It does not search for new flights. It only returns alternative fare families for the same selected itinerary, each as a fully bookable flight-offer.
Yes. You must send the complete, unmodified flight-offer JSON from the search response. Any trimming or restructuring can cause INVALID DATA errors or missing upsell results.
Yes. Even after upsell selection, you must call the Flight Offers Price API to revalidate fare, taxes, and availability before creating the booking.
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