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The answer above has some good information, but it's also munging together unrelated topics. Flight search APIs that aggregate other, existing, APIs (like the mentioned Skyscanner and Duffel) aren't the same thing that ITA flight search or the Amadeus/Sabre/Travelport flight search engines are. The hard problem the flight search engines solve is initially for the airlines. They have aircraft of different capacities, ranges, seat types, and so on. Then, different tiers of fares based on seat type, advance purchase, refundability, add-ons like priority boarding, bag fees, inflight wi-fi, etc. Then, a "flight" is some combination of actual flight "legs" (single takeoff + landing). So, airlines want to maximize revenue. To do that, they set available inventory levels for many of the unique combinations of all the variables above. Perhaps, for example, only 10 of the "deep discount" point-a->b->c coach seats, but 50 for the highest priced b->c leg. Oh, and the price is higher on day "X", because some popular sporting event is held in city "c" on that day, and the morning flights priced even higher. If you extrapolate then, you can tell that someone wanting to fly from a->c has a lot of different possible fares, with each fare having a different number of available seats to sell. And all those variables are changing underneath your search, all the time. And, you're obligated to show actual fares, including taxes, fees, etc, which vary dynamically by airport, pax type, etc. Companies like Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport, and so on did a reasonably good job over the years of exposing APIs to both airlines and travel agents to search these. ITA came along with a more computer science based approach and made the shopping part of this much faster, with more results, flexible, more tunable by the airlines, etc. |