Your Checkfront inventory is made up of 'items' that are added to bookings, and have complex availability controls and rules defining their stock and prices.
When no dates are passed in the API call, a full list of enabled items in the inventory is displayed, without specific availability and pricing.
However, if you pass in the relevant booking dates (and optionally parameters, discount codes, etc), the API will return a "rated" response that includes pricing and availablity, as well as a "slip" that will be used to add the item to a session.
The item SLIP is an encoded string returned when making a rated query to a specific item. The slip contains the information needed to make a booking. Don't attempt to reverse engineer this, as the format changes. It must be optioned via a rated API call.
Booking parameters are defined globally in your system, and can be configured on a per item basis. Your parameters specify the number of items to book, for example Child and Adult. These are completely configurable in your Checkfront account under Manage / Settings / Configure.
To query specific pricing and availability, you need to pass the appropriate parameters in your API call (using the parameter IDs as specified in your configuration).
Say for instance you have 2 parameters configured: Adults (id: adults), and Children (id: children). To get pricing for 2 adults and one child you would pass: param[adults]=2¶m[children]=1 in your API call.
Booking parameters have many options, and can be configured to control inventory in very specific ways. See the Checkfront support centre or ask us for more information.
../examples/response/item.json
../examples/response/item-rated.json