I've been doing some research into writing an automated flight search engine for myself right now. I was planning to do this through an API but scraping may be ok, and potentially necessary. I have a couple of requrirements and wanted to consult the forum to see if anyone has any suggestions to APIs or other ways to accomplish this. The only really releveant previous thread I've found is this one regarding scraping ITA Matrix:
ITA software scrape
The requirements I have are are to query with:
- Airline
- Fare class, (not cabin) specifically to filter out Basic Economy since Cabin these days can't differentiate different levels of Economy.
- Origin and Destination (One way, round)
- Dates
- Cabin
- Price
Objectives are filtering by:
These are objectives because I can filter them out after the query. I'm concerned letting BE come through the search will override the regular main fares and cannot be done after, or result in a lot of excess data.
I'm also willing to pay $5-10 a month for access. The largest issue that i've come across is
not being able to filter the search by fare class.
So far I've found many options for APIs but only one that's come close to meeting requirements
- Sabre is the closest. They seem to have APIs that work for doing flight searches, but no search filter for the fare class. They return the fare basis in some though and I can extract the fare class there and filter on my end but it's suboptimal. Cost is also unknown.
- Amadeus seems to be similar to Sabre but the cost per call is too high for what I need I think. Rough math for myself i'd see myself doing maybe 5,000 - 10,000 calls a day.
- Kiwi. Everything but fare class. Pricing unknown.
- Skyscanner: Similar to Kiwi
- Travelport: No public info?
Scraping ITA Matrix with some difficulty seems to be a way to do this all because I can filter out fare classes there. This seems to be a method others have used in the past as well but I'd prefer not to scrape if I can avoid it due to the mitigations of throttling and risk of changing interfaces.
Scraping Momondo would be difficult as well but at least Momondo has a BE filter option.
https://www.amarinfotech.com/best-fl...html#more-desc seems to have a good list of APIs here but it can be tough to get through the list.
Thanks!