nort

I have an expertflyer account and I use it to search for fares between pairs of cities. But is there a service that will alert you whenever a new fare has been filed in specific fare classes between cities that I'm interested in? It seems that a lot of time, when the fares get posted here or on one of the fare deals websites, it's already too late. Is there an automated way to monitor GDS to find out new fares that have been filed? Specifically, I'm looking for CX E/R fares, BA T fares and AA asterisk PE fares to Asia. Even if a service doesn't exist, is it possible to find these via some API? I might be able to create a tool. I recently sign up for a skyscanner API account, but I wonder if such a service (free/paid) already exists, or whether it's possible to build one via free/paid APIs available to end users (not restricted to travel agents or businesses).

Edit: I'm afraid I posted this in the wrong forum. Mods, can you move this to Mileage Run Discussion forum please. Apologies and thanks.

Freddorick

nort

That's very informative. Thanks very much.

fuyao

Yes, there is. Get an ATPCO / SITA account, then you can see any public fare there is. Will cost you min 10k$/year thou.

18sas

I asked ExpertFlyer about basically the same idea, creating fare alerts, years ago. The answer was that the fare queries were too expensive relative to things like seat map requests, availability requests, etc.

nort

That's interesting. I was thinking how multiple carriers suddenly go on offering the same discounted prices between the same pairs of cities all at the same time. So, I guess the answer lies in querying the new fares from ATPCO ( or SITA?) and filing competing fares right away. They probably have millions of dollars worth of subscriptions, hardware and software doing the number crunching to do this. It doesn't make financial sense for an individual, but if a subscription service like ExpertFlyer can't monetize that as a business, I don't know who can.

nort

They do allow the premium members to perform unlimited fare queries right? I haven't looked into whether they can be automated. But do they see a big difference in the volume of queries (hence cost) between manual and automated fare queries?

MSPeconomist

fuyao

Yes, but they still have to pay for every request they send out to a GDS.
FYI to get an idea, Sabre asks 0.02$ / each fare quote request when going through the API and not doing it manually through their software.
Now you need to do a fare request for each city pair + date, thats gonna be a REALLY expensive service to offer. And even then, just because you know the basefares, doesnt mean you know good fares.
When US airways was around, they always had those 1$ basefares between Scandinavia and the U.S., but still heavy YQ.
Now with all the basic economy on TATL, you also have very low bf, even 1$ again.

So even if you have access to ATPCO data and setting up an alert, you'd get lots of 1$ basefare alerts that are still expensive including the YQ.
What one would be interested in were the total price incl taxes and fees. But for that you need a pricing engine (=GDS), and use something like Amadeus MasterPricer. But then its specific for a route+date again and youd need to do millions of requests before you find something nice.
1million*0.02$=20k$

Dont get me wrong, if you have a better idea, let me know, I'm all ears!
But I know people who actually have ATPCO access and it didnt help them anything in finding better fares, they can see ALL basefare information and get a push update every 5minutes from ATPCO, but it doesn't help them anything in finding error fares etc.

Everyone else I know who actually finds error fares has built their own scraping crawling OTAs.

nort

Thanks for the responses. It seems the only feasible way to find mistake fares by oneself is to scrape the OTAs. Someday when I have enough time, I might get to it. For now, I'll just have to watch the forums and other sites that post fare deals.