
To begin with, where the legs grow.
We all know such successful startups like
kayak.com and
momondo.com .
These systems take a new approach to finding such important for any traveling information as prices for flights and hotels. The point of innovation is that the mediating link in the form of global booking systems, such as
Amadeus ,
Siren , is being dropped. Information is collected directly from airline sites.
This allows:
a) - find the cheapest tickets sold only on sites (such as tickets for 990 rubles on the
S7 airline website) that do not fall into the database of reservation systems.
b) - order a ticket directly on the airline's website, without intermediary services.
c) - when ordering a ticket on the airline's website, participate in all bonus programs.
In Russia, I have not found such a system. Kayak is looking very badly in our region. Momondo is a little better, for it is European in origin, but also unsatisfactory.
So the idea was born to make something similar, but for Russian airlines.
A list of the 35 largest air carriers of Russia in the first half of 2007 was found and work began.
In the first ten, everything was fine - companies have their own websites with booking systems and search systems, to which you can form a GET or POST request, and get results. Then it was worse - the airlines were getting smaller and smaller, and booking of tickets was becoming more and more impossible.
The result was 17 sites of Russian airlines, 4 of which are included in AirUnion and sell tickets centrally, + 2 sites of Ukrainian airlines. In total, 19 airlines were covered.
In contrast to such serious systems as Kayak, it was decided not to store information about tickets in the database, but to access the sites each time anew for each request.
The disadvantage of this approach is its non-scalability under high loads.
Pros - the speed of implementation and the relevance of the reservation at the time of the request.
For completeness, the issue includes search results in Amadeus and Siren reservation systems, and for those looking for an international flight, a kayak is issued using api.
In the plans:
- track the sites of Russian companies for inclusion in the search.
- add companies in the CIS.
- expand the functionality for search by date plus / minus two three days.
- transition to issue from its own database.
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Although the service is a little amateur in performance, I hope it will be useful.