A partnership pitch usually sounds great. Access to a huge inventory, a new revenue stream, a feature you couldn't build yourself. The commercial team is excited, the deck is polished, and someone wants to know how fast engineering can integrate.
At Travelxp I led the API strategy with global travel aggregators, payment gateways and content networks. Some of those integrations opened up important revenue. Others cost far more to maintain than anyone expected when the deal was signed. The difference usually showed up in questions nobody asked early enough.
Look past the headline numbers
A partner might offer millions of hotel listings or thousands of titles. What matters is how much of that inventory is relevant to your users, how accurate it is, and how often it changes.
| Area | Questions to ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Data quality | How fresh is pricing and availability? How often are records wrong? | Bad data becomes your problem in front of users |
| Coverage | Does the inventory match the markets and users you serve? | Big catalogues can still miss what you need |
| Technical fit | Response times, rate limits, documentation, sandbox | Slow or unreliable APIs hurt every page they touch |
| Change management | How do they announce breaking changes? How much notice? | Unannounced changes create emergencies |
| Support | Who do you call when it breaks at night? | Integrations always break eventually |
| Commercial terms | Commission, minimums, exclusivity, termination | Shapes what the partnership is really worth |
Test with real data before committing
If you can, get sandbox or trial access and test with real queries before the deal is final. Run the searches your users actually make. Check prices and availability against what the partner shows on their own channels. Measure response times.
This is the closest thing to user research for a partnership. A demo shows the partner's best case. A test with your own traffic patterns shows what you'll actually get.
Count the cost of maintenance
The initial integration is the visible cost. The ongoing cost is often larger:
- Monitoring and handling errors.
- Updating when the partner changes their API.
- Reconciling bookings, payments or usage reports.
- Support time when users hit partner-side problems.
- Mapping and cleaning data that doesn't quite match your format.
I'd ask engineering for a rough estimate of ongoing effort, not just the initial build. If that number is high, the partnership needs to be worth more to justify it.
Plan for the partner having a bad day
Every partner API will fail sometimes. Before integrating, decide what your product does when it does. Show cached results? Hide that partner's inventory? Show a clear error?
These are product decisions, and they're much easier to make before launch than during an outage. Payments are a special case with their own failure modes, which I wrote about in the payment gateway integration post.
Don't build your product on one partner
Relying entirely on one partner for a core part of the product gives them a lot of power over you. If they change terms, raise prices or shut down an API, you have very few options.
Where it matters, I'd want either a second source or at least an architecture that makes switching possible. That doesn't always justify the extra work, but it's worth discussing openly.
Agree on success measures
Like any product bet, a partnership should have a clear measure of success and a review point. Revenue, bookings, engagement, whatever the deal was meant to deliver. Review it honestly after a few months.
Some partnerships turn out to be less valuable than expected. That's fine, as long as you notice and decide what to do about it, instead of maintaining an integration forever because nobody wants to admit it isn't working.