Flight Search API Options (with Fare Class Filter)
 

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: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trav...re-scrape.html

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:

• Times
• Layover durations

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!

Hi, I am also looking for those kind of APIs as well for my own program. It's quite a "cross-disciplinary" topic.

However, there are quite a few major obstacles:

• All available and possible APIs that I have gone through don't have the ability to search with fare class. You have to find some creative way to achieve that without getting access to raw database. Although there are APIs that return information that include whether this itinerary is basic economy. The keyword you might need here is "unbundled". Sabre, Amadeus, and TravelPort do seem to have options for bundled fare only, but these options might only appear in their entreprise APIs.
• Affiliate APIs ask you for quality traffic with certain conversion rate requirement. Such as Skyscanner, they have a Traffic Quality Score to assess your requests. A lot of affiliate APIs require user IP in your requests. They are also likely to have rules against caching or redistributing fare data. Not sure how strict these affiliate programs are, but the rules are there.
• You are either getting the API for free or paying a much higher price for paid API than $10 a month. It's not gonna get you anywhere with $5 to 10.
• I have the same reserves about scraping. You are making requests everyday instead of a one-time thing. It's quite likely to bump into a rate limit or IP ban. I also doubt the efficiency of scraping and the time it would take to scrap from 5000-10000 requests everyday.
• Many commerical APIs are not accepting individual users/developers. They only accept corporations in the industry.

I have gone through that list before. It seem to contain very few viable APIs that we can use.

It seem hard to find a proper API to use already, not to mention excluding basic economy. Good luck on it.

Thanks for the reply.

Such a shame we can't filter by class or that airlines aren't willing to call BE a different cabin to make searching easier.
Yea this was only intended for personal use so no way I could make a conversion rate requirement.

Shame that there isn't anything "affordable" out there. Even at $40 a month like I've heard sabre has done in the past, that's still potentially viable if it saves me that much per month in booking.
Seems like resorting to scraping may be the only viable outcome. I might give sabre a try if I can get them to price it out. These guys seem to have figured out how to scrape well https://medium.com/brisk-voyage/how-...s-79f5ddbdc4c0

Good luck to you, as well. Hopefully something can be found. Need to find the motivation again now that the winter break is over.

Sabre used to be difficult with giving production access unless your website has a certain size, not sure if that has changed.

Amadeus is pretty good as an API, but expensive and misses AA/BA fares (no idea what other airlines might be missing).

KIWI is a pretty good (and free) API, though as you rightly pointed out it does not tick the fare class box. Also, some of the fares (especially premium cabins) are stale, this only becomes clear when you move to the actual booking stage.

There are some airline specific APIs (Lufthansa is good), but the offering is very niche for the airline itself or related airlines.

If you find anything better, would be interested to hear about it.