Understanding Places

Places are a geographically entity used by OpenBooking to identify the location of an accommodation object. Basically, Places are real places, cities or points of interested. The have a unique ID which is assigned to the accommodation object and can be used to query and filter.

• A Place hat the following attributes:
• Place ID
• Official name
• Type (i.e. city)
• Longitude/Latitude coordinates
• ZIP Code and country
• Language spoken

For Switzerland, Places contain also the following attributes::

• R-Key of Switzerland Tourism
• Touristic region (i.e. Bernese Oberland)

Places contain many alias-names and names on different languages to be able to do full-text searches, i.e. for auto-suggest text boxes.

Example of a Place:

{ 
    "_id" : "OCH536", 
    "coordinates" : {
        "lat" : 46.65685092735951, 
        "lng" : 7.435815282377841
    }, 
    "name" : "Oberwil i.S.", 
    "searchfield" : "Oberwil i.S. Rossberg", 
    "language" : "de", 
    "type" : "city", 
    "regionId" : "007", 
    "country" : "CH", 
    "zip" : ["3765"], 
    "region" : {
        "de" : "Berner Oberland", 
        "en" : "Bernese Oberland", 
        "fr" : "Oberland Bernois", 
        "it" : "Oberland Bernese"
    }
}

Types

A Place is of a specific type, which can be:

• city
• region

Regions

In OpenBooking you can create Regions (Places of type region) which are lists of Places that belong together and can be used for querying and filtering. For example, Zermatt Tourism considers the following three places to be "Zermatt":

• Zermatt
• Täsch
• Randa

Instead of executing three different queries you can create a Region in the Admin Console and put in the three Places. After the Region is created, you can use it to query and filter by that region.

• Regions are completely customizable and are not shared with other client in OpenBooking
• Regions are live filters, which means they work immediately after they are created
• You can create as many Place Collections as you want