[FaceKicker]

Pretty tangential, but why is it that none of the flight search engines include Southwest? I realize that Southwest doesn't give their fare info to whoever the other airlines give it to, but what's stopping someone from just scraping southwest.com every hour or so for the current fares? Or even if scraping is against their TOS, couldn't they hire one data entry employee to manually go through and add Southwest's flights every day? Or is it somehow illegal to publish Southwest's prices?

I imagine it would be a big competitive advantage for whichever one did it first - it's pretty annoying how every time I want to search for flights I have to first search on Kayak/Hipmunk/GoogleFlightSearch and then separately go to southwest.com and wade through their slow, awful search interface.

[calbear81]

Southwest does not believe in distributing their fares through the metasearch or OTA channel. They want to own the customer and make sure there's only one destination to book Southwest fares and that is Southwest.com and it's worked out pretty well for them.

The hard part for scraping is that it's both against their TOS and you wouldn't be able to have accurate availability and price information through manual data entry. The nature of how frequent price changes and the number of possible combinations of fare types/routes/availability is what gave rise to companies like ITA.

[FaceKicker]

> The hard part for scraping is that it's both against their TOS and you wouldn't be able to have accurate availability and price information through manual data entry. The nature of how frequent price changes and the number of possible combinations of fare types/routes/availability is what gave rise to companies like ITA.

Anecdotally, whenever I've checked Southwest prices multiple days in a row they usually stay the same. So I'd imagine it would still be a valuable enough resource if there were someone who did this manually at the granularity of a day, even if when you clicked through to buy the tickets they occasionally wouldn't match the price the search engine told you. You could even have a "report this price as incorrect" button.

[bradleyland]

Yes, but if you're a website serving millions of customers per day, you need a contractual arrangement to A) have up to the moment pricing, and B) agreement that the airline will honor the prices published on your site.

Because airfare prices follow an upward trend as flight time approaches (although they sometimes taper as the flight date gets really close), you'd inevitably publish prices that are out of date and lower than the actual fare. This is unavoidable because you're relying on scraping, which involves polling, in which there is always a delay due to polling intervals. You'd stand to lose millions of dollars every time a price increase occurred between the time that a customer decides to book a ticket at one price, and the time your polling system picks up the increase.

Circumventing Southwest's desire to avoid this channel is not a good business model.

[muratmutlu]

I booked a Southwest flight last week using Kayak. Try it for yourself, here's a screengrab from just now

http://cl.ly/image/3j0Z2m1Y2N44

[FaceKicker]

Interesting, I've never noticed Southwest results in my Kayak searches before (maybe it's new). But when I try it, it doesn't actually give the price as in your screenshot, it just has a link labeled "Info" (which goes to the southwest.com homepage) where the price would normally be. I wonder if it has something to do with you being in the UK?

[muratmutlu]

that's weird, when I booked my flight I was in the states...might be certain routes or something?