How do web-based airline fare comparison apps get airline tickets from multiple airlines?

Question

As above, just because of a painful curiosity. Do individual airline sites have APIs for use with these engines? Or do you write programs to navigate individual websites and specify the input data (source, destination, departure dates, returns) and get the results (price, time, etc.)?

Edit: Ok just found this after I submitted the question. However, it would be interesting to see how this is done programmatically. Tell in Java which libraries would be good for this?

Answer 1

There are several ways to get this information. The best (and most reliable) would be to contact the airlines you intend to deal with. Many, if not most, will have public APIs to access their reservation system, allowing users to request flight quotes, seat availability, and reservations. Of course, this usually requires a contract between you and the airline telling you how you can use this information, and for orders you probably need another contract with them to process payments, kickbacks, etc.

Such APIs may be “modern” SOAP systems or more old-fashioned things like EDI, EJB calls or something else, but the principle remains: you request something, their servers provide the requested information.

Less ethically correct, harder to implement and much more fragile, you can try the screensavers of your backup engines. But the screen layout, of course, changes regularly :)

Answer 2

When working with several “modern” airlines (almost oxymoron), aggregators must poll the fare search page and “creak the screen,” and when the airline updates the structure page, it must be very fast to change the parser there.