Where to find airfare feeds

April 4, 2009 4:29 AM

I'm working on a side project around air travel and I need a good source of airfares. Something like an affiliate feed would be great but it needs to have as many city pairs and prices as possible. The best solution would be an API through some of the major OTAs and aggregators. Any clues?
posted by cubedweller to Travel & Transportation (3 answers total)

That might be impossible, as airfares are almost quantum-like in their instability. They are very much demand-based, so as people buy tickets the prices change. And to some extent, the airlines probably don't want people to have access to their raw data.
posted by gjc at 7:01 AM on April 4, 2009

Do you have money? Because you will probably need it. Sabre has some web services available for purchase. Some of the other Global Distribution Systems will as well.
posted by grouse at 12:43 PM on April 4, 2009

Most of the larger agencies (STA travel, for example) use Sabre, and as grouse says, they're not cheap. The only other player I know of is ITA—they're basically the Google of airline pricing, except for the free.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:28 PM on April 4, 2009