Using Mews Booking Engine API to display daily prices in a custom calendar

Booking engine API is probably not best here - to answer the queries as numbered:

1. No - the Connector API will be better as this allows a call of rates/getPricing and services/getAvailability which give daily breakdowns - the BE api gives just one rate to cover whole period as a total.
2. Yes - using connector API though as above.
3. If using BE api instead of connector, there is high probability of hitting rate limits as you would need to one call per day
4. Enterprise is needed for a custom API using any service, unless you publish in marketplace; the BE api is only available to enterprise.
5. As above for connector endpoints

Mews Connector API | Connector API | Mews Open API - source for above endpoints etc.

Whilst you can develop yourself, the considerations above may mean looking at another option such as linking via a different BE service entirely, but that's your choice.

Hope this helps

Matt

Thanks,

do somebody know a developer that can do the job ? 

Hello ​@Gerchou,

I’m Josue - one of the Community Ambassadors - and I’m happy to help clarify your question regarding the Booking engine calendar. 

To be fully transparent, the exact experience you’re aiming for – a custom calendar on your website that shows day-by-day prices and availability, while still using the standard Mews Booking Engine for the final booking step – is not something we currently support in a reliable way via the Booking Engine API.

The API does not provide a lightweight, calendar-style pricing endpoint, and using it to poll daily prices for an entire calendar would quickly run into rate-limit and performance issues. In practice, achieving what you describe would mean building and maintaining a fully custom booking engine on top of our APIs, which goes beyond the pattern we support for properties today. For now, the supported options are the standard Booking Engine (standalone or widget), or a larger custom integration using our Connector API with deep links into the Mews Booking Engine.

To address your 5 questions specifically: 

1. Is the Booking Engine API the correct API for this?
   The Booking Engine (Distributor) API is what you’d use if you want to build a fully custom booking front end on top of Mews. It is not designed as a simple “price calendar API” that you plug on top of the existing Booking Engine – it’s essentially a “build-your-own booking engine” toolkit. More details: https://docs.mews.com/booking-engine-guide/booking-engine-api

2. Can we retrieve daily (per-date) pricing for a calendar?
   The API can return availability and prices for given dates and occupancies, but there is no dedicated endpoint that returns a ready-made “price per day calendar”. To populate a full calendar you’d have to make many calls and compute per-day prices yourself, which quickly becomes heavy for longer ranges and is not recommended.

3. What limitations/best practices (rate limits, caching) should we be aware of?
   The Booking Engine API has stricter rate limits than the Connector API and is intended for interactive guest flows, not high-frequency polling from a single backend. If used, you’d need to:

   • Keep the searched date range small (e.g. a few weeks, not a full year).
   • Implement server-side caching and avoid calling the API on every small UI change.
   • Avoid patterns like “one request per cell per day”, which will hit rate limits very quickly.

4. Does this require a specific subscription level?
   Yes. Access to the Booking Engine API is available only for properties on the Enterprise bundle or with the relevant Connectivity add-on. It is not available on Essentials/Advanced/Pro without that entitlement.

5. Are there recommended endpoints for this type of use case?
   If you do go down the Booking Engine API route with the right subscription and development resources, you’d typically use Distributor API operations such as:

   • configuration/get – for configuration details (services, categories, etc.).
   • services/getAvailability – for availability over a date range.
   • services/getPricing or reservations/getPricing – for prices for specific dates/occupancies.
     These would then need to be combined and cached on your side to drive any custom calendar UI.

I hope to have clarified this further for you, I remain at your disposal 😎

~ Best regards,