Scraping Airline Data and Monitoring Flight Info

Before we’ll speak about airline data web scraping services, let’s speak about the travel industry. This industry is extremely dynamic, since the situation and the needs of a customer may change at any moment. That’s why for those who play in this field and want to beat the other players, it’s vital to keep up with the trends, customer current preferences, and even their own operation history in the course of a certain period of time.

Web scraping is one of the most popular modern services to collect all this information from the internet and other alternative sources for further analysis and processing. Web scraping services are now used extensively by various industries and businesses that tend to maintain a data-driven culture.

Let’s check the ways data scraping can be beneficial in the travel industry.

Data plays a decisive role in handling the problems the travel industry is facing right now. It helps to understand the trends of destinations, updated flight schedules and prices, details of new flights and carriers, and much more.

Along with scraping flight deals and pricing data, you can monitor clients’ feedback and opinions to improve your customer experience and boost sales by offering the best options for your consumers.

So, the common uses of web scraping are:

1. Comparative price analysis. When you scrape airline data from various carriers, you can analyze different proposals and prices against the general market offerings and design your tours, prices, and recommendations to the clients accordingly.
2. Market share analysis. Through web data scraping it’s possible to analyze the market shares of various brands and choose the right positioning of your brand as well as the right partners to cooperate with.
3. Working out effective marketing strategies. The insights on the customer sentiment and feedback from social media or thematic forums are helpful in understanding their tastes, preferences, expectations, and pain points. With all this information, you can craft the right marketing strategy to target your prospects with the right offers.
4. Prediction of the performance in a given period– if you are a service provider or run a travel aggregator definitely want to predict the amount of traffic to expect in a certain period to allocate resources in the right way and to adjust your marketing accordingly. Historical data scraping works well for the purpose, so you can extract it and analyze to coordinate your further actions.

Let’s look into the process and advantages of scraping airline data.

If you’d like to build a product based on some kind of data from airline websites, like for instance Google Flights, web scraping is one of the best ways to implement it. You can collect, aggregate and process data almost in real time.

One more option is to obtain the necessary data via API, but most known airlines have no API at all, or have huge limitations on the data you can get.

With the help of web scraping solutions, you can get and monitor all of the information that airline websites contain:

• flight schedules
• destinations
• ticket prices
• airport information
• flight changes

Advantages of Web Data Parsing for the Travel Sphere

1. Automatic data scraping is quick compared to other methods of extracting information from online sources.
2. You can choose the desired structured format of the collected data (XML, Excel, or CSV files), or upload it to the database you use.
3. The accuracy of data is high since it is collected by automated scrapers, and is not subject to human error.
4. The data extracted from multiple sources is of good quality and can be analyzed or used directly without much additional processing.

At DataOx, we know that airline website scraping is not an easy task. Many airline websites use third-party protection from specialized services. These services have  sophisticated protection, beginning with captcha and ending with complex mechanisms that track nonhuman behavior. A good example is British Airways, which has extremely complex protection against web scraping of flight prices and ticket information.

Such web monitoring solutions require constant maintenance as well as an excellent quality assurance process. Our data engineers test data manually and with the help of automatic software to make sure our web crawling application works properly, even for airline websites that are hard to scrape.

With DataOx, you can be sure to always receive usable data. We get rid of the irrelevant details, unnecessary tags and messages, and then double-check the information before delivering it to our clients.

Recently, DataOx developed a project for one of our clients that collected flight information from more than twenty-five airlines. This product helps people buy airline tickets for bonus miles. Bonus miles are given to consumers by almost all airlines when they use their services. With this offer, you save some amount of miles and can buy a ticket at a discount.

Airline website monitoring is an extremely difficult task. As each airline changes its site once a month on average, our engineers have to maintain the system constantly. We keep track of the target sites’ changes and make the necessary upgrades to our software.

We integrated our flight scraping software with our client’s software ecosystem.

Besides, you should always be careful to extract data legally, complying with the regulations in this sphere, and website policies. We know how to get the necessary information for you in a lawful manner.

Depending on your business goal, we can offer two basic types of solutions: flight data delivery and flight web scraping application development.

The first option fits those businesses who want to collect data once (for example, for market research purposes). The second option works best for startups that want to build a product based on scraped data.

Our data experts can help you develop a custom software solution for web flight data scraping. Just schedule a free consultation.