Agreement and go-live

Onboarding

Is an agreement required? Yes — before production activation, and not before you can review or build against this specification.

Four separate stages

These are deliberately not bundled — you can be finished with the first while the third has not started.

Stage	Needed to	Status
Technical specification	Read, review, design and estimate	Available now — this portal, the full spec, and `openapi.yaml`
NDA / data-protection terms	Exchange traveller data	Required before any real booking. Vietnam's Decree 13/2023/NĐ-CP applies.
Commercial & rate agreement	Agree the model, the percentage, who is merchant of record, who owns refunds	Not yet drafted.
Production credential activation	Send live traffic	After all of the above, plus a joint certification call

Environment status

The API is live; access is per credential

Every /api/partner/v1/* path is served. Without a credential they answer 401: what you can reach is decided by the client we issue you and the scopes on it, not by a global switch. So there is nothing to wait for on our side — as soon as you have a client id and secret, you can authenticate.

Your first credential is deliberately read-and-shop only — fleet:read, locations:read, rates:read, availability:read, quotes:write. You can authenticate, read the whole fleet and take real quotes with it. It carries no reservations:* scope, so it cannot create a booking. That is what makes it safe for us to hand you a working key on day one, given what the next paragraph says.

There is no permanent sandbox. Rocket runs a single production database. Certification happens on a scheduled attended call, against a small number of agreed test reservations that are cancelled immediately afterwards — Rocket will not label a production credential “sandbox” and pretend otherwise.

What Rocket still has to decide

None of these block you reviewing or building against the specification. They do block go-live.

The commercial model (retail / net / commissionable) and the percentage.
Merchant of record, settlement currency and cycle, and who carries FX.
Who owns cancellation refunds and chargebacks, and who holds the refundable security deposit.
Tax and fee presentation.
Reconciling the 300 km/day vehicle mileage allowance with Rocket's published consumer terms.
Support hours, response times, and the notice period for a breaking API change.

What Rocket needs from you

Confirmation that model-level availability is acceptable to your platform.
Whether a permanent sandbox is a hard requirement on your side.
Your expected look-to-book ratio and peak request volume, so rate limits are sized before your first peak.
Your codes for the four namespaces — vehicles, locations, accounts and rates.
Whether you need webhooks for booking status changes, or will poll.
Your tax and currency requirements.
Your draft agreement, if you would like to start from it.