<story><title>Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/17/google-flights-will-now-tell-you-when-fares-will-increase-help-you-find-cheaper-tickets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmbaggett</author><text>Fares and rules come from ATPCO (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atpco.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atpco.net&lt;/a&gt;). Flights come from OAG (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.oag.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.oag.com&lt;/a&gt;). Seat availability requires data directly from the carrier, usually via a live query to the carrier&amp;#x27;s reservation system.&lt;p&gt;The GDS companies get this data from these sources and then in turn provide (crappy) APIs for customers to use to query it.&lt;p&gt;In general, if you&amp;#x27;re doing bookings you can get small amounts of the data (a query at a time) from a GDS. Otherwise you&amp;#x27;re looking at millions of dollars per year. And then you need to write code to parse it and price tickets using it (approximately 1M LoC if you&amp;#x27;re terse about it -- more like 30M if you&amp;#x27;re a GDS).&lt;p&gt;(I know all this because I co-founded ITA Software, whose software now powers Google Flights.)</text></item><item><author>karakal</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m curious, how does one gain access to flight schedules&amp;#x2F;fares? Is this something that anyone can get their hands on and create a service (complexity aside), or do you need some sort of license that costs thousands of dollars?&lt;p&gt;Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single entity that aggregates from all of them? How does the actual data look like? (Is it a dump every X hours, or something more modern like a stream you can subscribe to?).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>morgante</author><text>This is what I love about HN. Someone asks a good technical question and literally one of the most qualified people in the world answers it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/17/google-flights-will-now-tell-you-when-fares-will-increase-help-you-find-cheaper-tickets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmbaggett</author><text>Fares and rules come from ATPCO (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atpco.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atpco.net&lt;/a&gt;). Flights come from OAG (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.oag.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.oag.com&lt;/a&gt;). Seat availability requires data directly from the carrier, usually via a live query to the carrier&amp;#x27;s reservation system.&lt;p&gt;The GDS companies get this data from these sources and then in turn provide (crappy) APIs for customers to use to query it.&lt;p&gt;In general, if you&amp;#x27;re doing bookings you can get small amounts of the data (a query at a time) from a GDS. Otherwise you&amp;#x27;re looking at millions of dollars per year. And then you need to write code to parse it and price tickets using it (approximately 1M LoC if you&amp;#x27;re terse about it -- more like 30M if you&amp;#x27;re a GDS).&lt;p&gt;(I know all this because I co-founded ITA Software, whose software now powers Google Flights.)</text></item><item><author>karakal</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m curious, how does one gain access to flight schedules&amp;#x2F;fares? Is this something that anyone can get their hands on and create a service (complexity aside), or do you need some sort of license that costs thousands of dollars?&lt;p&gt;Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single entity that aggregates from all of them? How does the actual data look like? (Is it a dump every X hours, or something more modern like a stream you can subscribe to?).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dudurocha</author><text>Thanks for Crash Bandicoot.&lt;p&gt;How did you go from games to developing airlines reservation and fares software?</text></comment>