How do travel search engines & aggregators get their source data?

Question

I'm tossing around a few ideas for travel search engines and I'm wondering how these sites get their source data. Do they scrape all the content from airline homepages? This seems like an enormous job given the number of airlines etc out there.

Is there some API or web service standard that every airline conforms too?

Am I going to have to negotiate access to the data APIs for every airline I wish to index?

Answer 1

This answer has some useful links:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/527007/airline-reservation-systems/527200#527200

You could also have a look at Amadeus and ITA websites(ITA was recently bought by google), but they are extremely expensive.

I would expect big news coming in this field in 1 year or so when google deal is approved.

@Fgblanch: The linked site doesn't seen to provide any such API, they are some kind of online advertising agency.

Answer 2

In the european case, there is an affiliate platform called tradedoubler that seems to provide such information through an API.

http://www.tradedoubler.com/index.html