How to find the best flights in the interface of Google-table

Start

I often travel and buy tickets.
And I also often suffer from the interface of air ticket aggregators.
I can not choose a ticket and make a purchase.

Case

I know exactly where I want to go.
I know about how many days.
And at about what dates - for example, this month.

This time I wanted to fly to Serfaus - this is a ski village in Austria.
Fly no earlier than January 5, return to later January 15. For 6-8 days.

Now you need to find the best ticket for these conditions.
The “best” in my case is a combination of an objective price and subjective convenience of a flight — time of departure / arrival, airport of departure, airline, and so on.

How is the case decided by the airline ticket aggregator

1. Transforming the village of Serfaus into the three nearest airports - Munich, Innsbruck and Zurich with the help of Google maps.
2. I go to the air ticket aggregator. I find a tool like "Calendar of low prices."
3. I open it in three tabs for three airports.
4. I choose January.
5. I start poking every day in January to see the time of departure / arrival and the price of the ticket.
6. If I liked a ticket, I poke it to make sure that there is a ticket. Because the cache.
7. To memorize which day I liked which ticket, I write it down in a notebook or table.

In the last three points I suffer.
Because I do not want to poke and check. I do not want to switch between tabs.
And I want to see really affordable tickets with departure time and price and choose one of them.
And buy it.

But, in the end, I do not find the right ticket for a psychologically comfortable time.
And without making a purchase, I leave.

How should the case be solved

1. I specify "Serfaus" in the "Where to" field in the aggregator.
2. I choose approximate dates.
3. I choose the appropriate duration.
4. I get a list of tickets to buy.
5. I choose the right ticket and buy.

... there is no such scenario for aggregators.

Thoughts

• Aggregators do not know how to work with my script.
• We have 2017, web 3.0, * aas'y, microservices and generally soon to Mars.
• There is a million API to search for tickets, I will sip my blackjack.

Finding a solution

Half-hour googling showed that in 2017 there is no free API for searching for tickets.
None of the aggregators.

• But of course, there are a lot of affiliate programs, you say!
• Yes, there is a lot. But they do not give access to the API either in general (put our banner / widget and pour traffic to our website), or give, but after an opaque procedure for moderating applications for access to the API.
  One of the largest services writes like this - fill out an application, we will think about 4 weeks, then we can answer.

Google has the only API available. Called QPX Express .

Decision

With the help of QPX and Google App Script, in 70 minutes, an add-on was written to a Google table, which reads from it where you need to fly, searches for tickets, and writes all the price options to it.

The result looks like this:

At the top of the table I fill in from / to (IATA airport codes separated by commas) and in which date range I want to fly. I indicate how many days (comma-separated) I am ready to spend on the trip.
On the second half of the sheet, I get the result - a list of air tickets, ranked by price.
On one sheet I have all the appropriate options for air travel.
With the built-in filtering tools I can select the dates / time I need.

It remains to go to the airline's website and buy a ticket.

Minus Solution

Minus the solution - access to the API costs money (the first 50 requests per day are free, then $ 0.035 for 1 request), so it wasn’t possible to create a microsite for everyone.

While you can not drive a "Serfaus" in the "Where". I think that this will be solved by one of the Google APIs.

I want it too

If you want to look for tickets in the same way, here is the instruction how to do it.
Just test the QPX API here for free.

What's next

Hotel search is absolutely the same case, which closes just as uncomfortable.

And the ideal service is the one that will give the best couple of hotel tickets by the given criteria of flexible search.

If you know which services can give a free / paid API to search for tickets and / or hotels - write in the comment / PM.