Scraping Flight Prices for Equal Competition

Focus on Business

Flight prices along various routes vary throughout the day. If that’s news, don’t rush to your trusted browser just yet in search of a bargain. The web will not display such information about ticket prices. However, web scraping will get you that information from travel websites.

Scraping for flight prices requires you to install a web scraper program into your internet device. The program will gather data for your business needs and concerning predetermined dates for specific flight destinations. You receive notifications from your scraper when prices fall. Let’s dig deeper into this topic to understand why scraping flight prices could be useful for businesses.

Why do you need to scrape flight prices?

If you run a travel booking business on a digital platform, you need real-time airline updates to give your website an edge among your clients. Note that clients scour the internet all the time, looking for the travel booking agency with the best deals. For this reason, you need flight price data to compete fairly in the industry.

Alternatively, it could be that your business requires frequent travel for you or your staff. Accruing travel expenses can make a dent in profits through the running costs of a company. As such, scraping the web for bargain flight prices becomes prudent for the better financial performance of your company.

An appropriate pricing strategy ensures that your business does not charge prohibitively high costs that would keep clients away. On the other hand, your prices should not be too low that you forgo much needed financial returns to profit your business. One way of achieving fair pricing is by leveraging on a scraper to visit competitors’ websites anonymously for price comparison.

Collecting such data manually would be futile. Flight prices change faster than it would take you to gather the information, analyze it, and utilize it. Besides, flight data fluctuates depending on months, seasons, and peak periods.

Scraping software will keep your business informed about sites where an API will either be too costly or ineffective for collecting such data. You will gather intelligence on pricing trends and cheap routes. If you are interested in scraping flight prices, you can read more on Oxylabs about this phenomenon to decide if you are able to build your own travel price scraper!

A web scraper for flight prices

For you to run a scraper’s script for flight prices, you will need the following details:

• Name of the airline

• Name of the plane

• Flight price

• Flight number

• Ticket type

• Total time of the flight

• Departure time and airport

• Number of stops

• Names of stops

• Arrival time and airport

It also means that that is the information your bot will extract for you. That’s because bots collect accurate information depending on the rules and codes you create in the robots.txt file to guide the scraping.

If you choose to build a scraper to gather flight intelligence for your company, you will need some knowledge of computer programming. Alternatively, consider outsourcing to get an efficient and reliable tool since flight prices from a lucrative foundation for travel booking and hospitality business.

Benefits of web scraping for flight prices

Deploying web crawling to monitor categories of flights, the ones most in-demand, and the pricing, will give you valuable market intelligence. Your business should utilize that data to prioritize marketing campaign strategies based on prevailing market trends and sentiment analysis.

You can also leverage related services to enhance the value of the flight package offered by your company. For example, adding links to reviews and pricing of hotels and vacation rentals can add more conviction to your clients to choose your booking agency. Such location data provides valuable insights into compiling travel listings for your business.

Sometimes, some websites will not allow scrapers to access their data. Such will use restrictions based on the IP address of the server sending requests. Others will allow your server to access only a specific amount of data.

If you wish to scrap bulk data and to skip through geo-restricted blocks, you will need a scraper for anonymity. Such a program will assign you a different IP address that your target server accepts. You will now manage to scrap the website and gather the flight data your business needs.

Fair competition in digital marketing also concerns the appropriate and ingenious use of SEO resources. You can use flight data to monitor the ranking of keywords used by peers in the industry. You can monitor the efficiency of your optimization choices for search ranking.

Scraping for business and the use of scraped data has guidelines on infringements and violations. You can crawl different websites to learn about such terms, especially since your company is collecting data from different regions. Learn about local and international laws that govern scraping.

Also, follow up on any terms and regulations from airlines. Such rules, for instance, may outline conditions of redeeming discounts, offers, or accessing such cheap flights. Sometimes, an airline may post a wrong flight price, would they consider such a price glitch legitimate if clients made bookings on it? Crawl the web for such insights to avoid legal and financial liability and travel inconveniences.