Ticket Delivery

Distribusion offers two different options for ticket delivery.

Email & Tickets Sent by Distribusion

Distribusion can send the booking confirmation email (including all tickets in pdf and mobile formats) and cancellation email directly to the customer.

Simply set the parameter "send_customer_email": true in the /reservations/confirm request. In this case, the customer’s email address must be collected and provided in the booking request. Distribusion will always send both the pdf and the mobile ticket where available.

Booking Confirmation Email

Cancellation Confirmation Email

Email & Tickets Sent by Retailer

Alternatively, you can send your own confirmation and cancellation email to the customer and attach the tickets to that email. Simply set the parameter "send_customer_email": false in the /reservations/confirm request.

To create your own email you should use the details from /bookings/{booking_id} endpoint and retrieve the tickets from /bookings/{booking_id}/tickets endpoint. Read our Ticket Types guide for more details.

Email & Tickets Sent by Carrier

A few carriers, such as Amtrak, manage ticket delivery themselves by sending the confirmation and ticket directly to the customer.

For these specific carriers, the carrier sends its own branded confirmation email with the official PDF ticket to the email address used at the time of booking. Consequently, the "send_customer_email": true parameter is ignored, and no email is sent by Distribusion. The /bookings/{booking_id}/tickets endpoint will also not deliver a PDF ticket.

Carrier ticket and booking references

Carriers return their own references alongside the Distribusion ones. Three distinct values are involved, and they are easy to confuse:

• marketing_carrier_passenger_id, on segment_passengers — the carrier's ticket number for one passenger on one segment. This is the value a carrier's own systems and staff recognise as the ticket.
• marketing_carrier_booking_number, on each order item with a booking-level fallback — the carrier's booking reference (PNR).
• marketing_carrier_booking_numbers, on the booking — every carrier booking reference on the booking, as an array.

All three come back on /bookings/{booking_id} and on /reservations/{reservation_id}.

marketing_carrier_booking_number is held per order item, not only per booking. Where a journey involves more than one carrier, each carrier issues its own reference and each order item carries the one that belongs to it; the booking-level field holds the first of them, and marketing_carrier_booking_numbers holds all of them. On a multi-carrier itinerary, reading only the booking-level field surfaces one carrier's reference for the whole journey — read the item.

Not every carrier returns every value. Fields come back null where the carrier does not issue that kind of reference.