Getting access to the airlines booking info
 

Hi all,
I've been busy booking travel stuff lately and rapidly reached the conclusion that there wasn't a flight search engine out there that lets me search the way I want to search.

I'm also a web programmer, so I'm wandering whether I can cook up something myself. The first hurdle for this would be getting the ability to query flight availability and cost. Has anyone got ideas on where I would start with this?

Ideally there would be a web service somewhere that I could feed in flight details and get a response back. I suspect there is no single one and I'll need to hit a number of different services, possibly one per carrier.

Cheers,
Peter

My first impression from reading your post is that you have probably not looked at enough booking engines. Have you looked here? Please elaborate - which sites have you looked at, and specifically what is it that they cannot do?

Duebster, your link brings you back to this same thread.

Sorry - don't know how that happened. Corrected. Thx.

That's quite an impressive list of links. Thanks for pointing me at it.

My ideal flight search engine would let me choose what class I wish to fly and hat frequent flyer program I'm a member of. I would then want to choose a departure airport and have it give me a list of places I could fly on member airlines and how much it will cost.

The closest I've found is skyscanner.net, which does the type of search I want, but doesn't restrict it by ff program and always shows budget seats.

Expertflyer "sort of" has functionality that you want.

You can pick class or even fare basis codes and you can specify airline codes / alliance - that should take care of FF program.