How do travel sites "get" airline fares?

Posted by amrith on Monday September 07, 2009 @10:16AM
from the self-post dept.

How do travel booking sites (travelocity, expedia, itasoftware) get the database of airline fares?

Do they purchase a service from someone that provides them with a stream of fares and updates or do they go scrape screens?

I had assumed they purchased a feed from someplace but then I saw "The O'Hare Affair", a programming puzzle on ITA Software's web page and it seems like they scrape screens.

Ideas?

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Re:How do travel sites "get" airline fares? by nixy on Monday September 07, 2009 @10:33AM (#809184)

I believe most of them use Amadeus

http://www.amadeus.net http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS

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Re:How do travel sites "get" airline fares? by gaius on Monday September 07, 2009 @10:45AM (#809201)

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)

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Re:How do travel sites "get" airline fares? by blinkit on Monday September 07, 2009 @11:31AM (#809284)

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldspan

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Re:How do travel sites "get" airline fares? by joezydeco on Tuesday September 08, 2009 @11:17AM (#811160)

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_CRS (nee Apollo)

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Re:How do travel sites "get" airline fares? by Psyonic on Tuesday September 08, 2009 @02:18PM (#811527)

Trust me, ITA isn't scraping screens to get their data.

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