[rgbrgb]

To me it would make sense to go airline by airline (or datasource by datasource as long as they're tied to something users will understand), do the full integration, then advertise which airlines you support. Then you could guarantee a good experience for every officially supported airline. Additionally, as you do this you're building tech that is super valuable (sounds like only 2 other people have done it?).

Real estate data is similarly messy and though we have a small engineering team (3 full-time programmers), we decided to roll our own data integrations with each of the MLS systems we connect to. For us, it came down to the fact that we could provide a better user experience this way (faster, more complete listing data) and that it fits with our approach to product development. Rather than using a data middleman to turn on 50% listing coverage across the entire US, we pick a city or region and piece together all of the listing sources so that when we go live in that region we have extremely high coverage. We then only advertise to users in those areas.

[abakker]

The sad part is that we really need to completely displace/replace the MLS in its entirety. The value prop is there, as is the technology, but it would take a marketing miracle to convert everyone to a new system. Still, it is genuinely amazing that there isn't a better service for it.

[vijayr]

I wonder what other industry can benefit from a unified source of data - so far we have airline, real estate ... Any others?