Low Cost Airlines should have an API
If you live in Europe there are many opportunities for visiting the rest of the continent without spending much. There are more than 60 low cost airlines (e.g., Ryanair, EasyJet, …) and today they fly almost everywhere. Here are a couple of examples: two-ways ticket Pisa-Paris is about 50 euros in December, London-Barcelona about 80 euros.
The smart traveler probably figured out by now that can also use low-cost airlines to connect with the hubs of big airlines and save on all its travels. For example, a trip to New York City costs thousands of euros on average, but hopping through London with a low-cost flight can shave more than half of the cost. I do it regularly from Pisa to Denver, flying to London with Ryanair and then using British Airways.
Unfortunately, finding those deals is very complicated, if not impossible, for the average customer. Those flights and airlines are not listed in the normal ticketing system and thus Expedia, Orbitz or your local travel agent will not help you to find them.
You have to visit the site of your local airport, finding out which low-cost airlines fly there and where they go. Then manually go and check each site for dates and prices. That $50 weekend in Amsterdam exists, it’s just hard to find.
The solution? Open APIs and entrepreneurial spirits.
Low cost airlines should provide APIs to:
- Given an airport, list reachable destinations and flight times
- Given a route and a date, show ticket prices for a 2 week range
Then just sit and wait a couple of weeks. Smart kids around the globe will create mashups between those APIs, Google Maps, Wheater.com, OpenTable, TripAdvisor and who knows what else.
Those application will suggest you cheap weekends getaways from your local airport (or one nearby) using low-cost flights and checking forecast and travelers opinions in a simple calendar view, will show you ways to get on-time to that amazing Munich-Chicago flight deal on Wednesday morning without having to sell your car to buy the ticket from Lufthansa, or combine multiple low-cost carriers to fly you from Barcelona to Frankfurt for the cost of a DVD.
Airlines will be happy, because to buy the tickets customers will have to follow a link to their official site (landing directly to the checkout page), where they will able to rule their reign and continue to propose their “car/hotel bundle packages”.
Customers will be happy, because they will be able to finally afford to travel around and will get to know all the options available.
Entrepreneurs will be happy, because will have a new fertile ground to build the next travel app (last one was Kayak). And even if the airlines will not offer affiliate programs (e.g., give 3% of the ticket price to the author of the site) to make their API more interesting, I am sure that smart entrepreneurs will find other ways to generate revenues for their sites.
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