APIs

Top 9 Best Flight & Travel APIs (Updated for 2021)

API’s (Application Programming Interface) are tools for building software applications.

They show software components on how they can interact.

You are probably using it right now and aren’t even aware.

Widespread adoption of smartphones and other handheld devices have made it a hot topic in our current market.

Without API’s, the digital experience that consumers encounter today would be entirely impossible.

So, what problem do API’s solve?

Generally, API’s create the rules that programmers ought to utilize so that they can interact appropriately with a programming language.

The software allows the consumer to access data in real time.

The API acts as an intermediary between the actual source of the data and what the user eventually views on their smartphone or computer.

There are very many API’s that serve different market niches and traveling API’s are one of the most popular.


What is the best travel and flight API?

After reviewing over 46 travel and flight APIs, we found these 8 APIs to be the very best and worth mentioning:

Our Top 8 Best Travel APIs for 2021

Skyscanner Flight Search Best for Flight Search & Flight Prices Connect to API
Hotels.com API Best for
Hotel Search Data
Connect to API
TripAdvisor Best for
All Around Travel Data
Connect to API
webcams.travel Best for
Global Webcam Data
Connect to API
Booking Best for
Hotel Booking Data
Connect to API
Airports Finder Best for
Airport Data
Connect to API
IATA and ICAO Codes Best for
Airlines Data
Connect to API
TrailAPI Best for
Hiking & Biking Trails
Connect to API

List of our Top Picks for Best Travel APIs

Here are some of the top travel and flight APIs that we thought were worth mentioning:

1. Skyscanner Flight Search

With Google Flights API’s deprecation, Skyscanner saves the day as a great flights API alternative.

The Skyscanner API lets you search for flights and get ticket prices from Skyscanner’s database.

You can also get live quotes directly from ticketing agencies.

Some of the endpoints are:

  • Browse Dates – returns the cheapest dates for a given route
  • Browse Quotes – returns the cheapest price quotes
  • Browse Routes – returns the cheapest routes

Skyscanner API Key

Get a free API Key on RapidAPI for the Skyscanner Flight Search API.

Skyscanner API Cost & Pricing

The Skyscanner API is a free to use travel API on RapidAPI.com.

Read more about Skyscanner API here.

2.
Hotels.com API

The Unofficial Hotels.com API provides data that allows you to search for hotel rooms, pricing, facilities, policies, locations, and much more using their RESTful service.

Hotels API is a freemium-based plan which allows for 500 monthly free calls. Higher-tiered plans are available for heavier users.

3.
TripAdvisor

The unofficial TripAdvisor API by APIdojo has a very comprehensive API that offers the same data you see on the official site, including:

  • Questions & Answers
  • Photos
  • Tips
  • Restaurant Data
  • Reviews
  • Flights
  • Hotels
  • Attractions
  • and much more.

4.
webcams.travel

The webcams.travel API gathers webcams from around the world and makes them accessible to developers through their REST API. Developers can use this API to enrich their website or app with free webcam content.

Functionality

  • Return a list of webcams within a given lat long coordinates
  • Get webcams by category
  • Get webcams by continents
  • Get webcams by country
  • Get webcams by ID
  • Get webcams by radius
  • Get webcams by properties

Webcams.travel Pricing

The webcams.travel API allows you to get quality & maintained content, a timelapse player for free via the RapidAPI interface.

5.
Booking

The unofficial Booking.com API is a RESTful API that allows developers to query:

  • rooms
  • prices
  • facilities
  • policies
  • and other hotel data

The Booking API is the perfect API to enrich your website or app with hotel data.

Pricing

The Booking API has a freemium pricing model that allows up to 500 free API requests per month. Higher priced plans are available as well.

6.
Airports Finder

The Airports Finder is an application and REST API that allows you to find airports that are near a given location.

It also provides airport search within a certain region.

Users can provide a location and radius in km to find where they can fly from and to. The airport lookup API can be integrated with other apps and services to get data you need.

7.
IATA and ICAO Codes

The IATA and ICAO Codes API provides insights into specific airlines by IATA code.

The API goes into detail about:

  • alliance
  • iata code
  • icao code
  • low cost carrier status
  • name
  • and website

This API is complete free to use on RapidAPI.

8.
TrailAPI

The TrailAPI is an API that provides information and photos for 10s of 1000s of outdoor recreation locations including:

  • Hiking Trails
  • Mountain Biking Trails
  • Campgrounds
  • Ski Resorts
  • ATV trails
  • and more!

TrailAPI Pricing

The TrailAPI is a freemium API that allows developers 500 free API requests/day and 10 map data requests/day. Paid plans are available for higher usage.


How Are APIs Relevant in Traveling?


via GIPHY

Travelers desire to have all possible traveling options at hand.

Well, a travel API makes this possible.

It consolidates multiple web services that allow you to access different deals.

People can today make a reservation in an “all-in-one-place” platform that has revolutionized the user experience making everything more straightforward.

In basic terminology, a traveling API allows a traveling website or application owner to integrate third-party GDS (Global Distribution System) feed into the booking mechanism of their website.

Instead of a browser having to leave your site to pay for a particular service, they complete everything including payment on a single platform.

Summary: Best Travel APIs for Developers

API Main Functionality Popularity Score Latency Success Rate
Skyscanner Flights 10/10 260ms 37%
Hotels.com Hotels 5.3/10 2046ms 100%
TripAdvisor Restaurants, Hotels, Flights, Reviews 4.0/10 1210ms 100%
webcams.travel Webcams 9.9/10 368ms 100%
Booking.com Hotels 9,7/10 2871ms 99%
AirportsFinder Airports 9.4/10 204ms 100%
IATA and ICAO Codes Airlines 9.0/10 143ms 100%
TrailAPI Outdoor Recreation 8.4/10 276ms 99%

Related Resources

4.6 / 5 ( 10 votes )

Complete List of the Best Travel APIs

  • TripAdvisor – These APIs help to query realtime Flights prices, Hotels booking, Restaurants, Attracting locations, etc…
  • Hotels – Hotels API helps to query rooms, price, facilities, policities, etc information from many hotels around the world as on official site.
  • ADSBexchange.com – Data for Live Air Traffic and Flight locations via ADS-B/MLAT – This API for non-commercial, personal use only.
  • ADSBx Flight Sim Traffic – ADSBexchange.com traffic feed for flight simulators
  • AirHex – AirHex is a service with daily updated supplemental travel content, which includes airline logos, airline check-in URL’s and handy purified IATA database
  • TimeTable Lookup – This method returns OTA compliant timetable data. From an airport to an airport for a specific date or date range.
  • AirportsFinder – Airports Finder is an application and REST API that allows you to find airports that are near a given location. It also provides airport search within a certain region. Users can provide a location and radius in km to find where they can fly from and to. The airport lookup API can be integrated with other apps and services to get data you need.
  • BART – The BART API gives you access to pretty much all of the BART service and station data available on the BART website.
  • Booking – Booking API helps to query rooms, price, facilities, policities, etc information from many hotels around the world as on official site.
  • British Airways Flight Info – British Airways is the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom and its largest airline based on fleet size, international flights and international destinations
  • Daily Fuel Price – India – Get prices of Petrol and Diesel in India. Prices are updated DAILY. Please report bugs.
  • Evercam Public Cameras – Returns a list of publicly discoverable cameras from within the Evercam system.
  • Flight Bookings – We’re providing developer-friendly API’s to major low cost and full service carriers with capabilities to search, price and book flights realtime. We directly dive into the inventory of airlines and GDS partners.
  • Flight Data – Dates are accepted in the formats YYYY-MM and YYYY-MM-DD.
  • geolocation.ws – Browse geolocated Creative Commons photos taken from Panoramio, Flickr and Wikimedia Commons websites. Registered users can add one or more tags describing image content.
  • Google Maps Geocoding – Geocoding is the process of converting addresses (like “1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA”) into geographic coordinates (like latitude 37.423021 and longitude -122.083739), which you can use to place markers on a map, or position the map.
  • GoogleMapsDistanceMatrix – Calculate travel distance and time between destinations.
  • Great Circle Mapper – Use Great Circle Mapper to calculate the air distance and flight time between all airports worldwide.
  • Hipmunk – API to query realtime Flights prices, Hotels booking
  • Holiplus – Hotels, Tours and Car rental in Cuba
  • IATA and ICAO – IATA ICAO airports airlines airplanes and much more data. A powerful API of all aviation data. Our tools contain Flight Track, Airport Timetables, Flight Routes and all the information about airports, airlines, airplanes and so much more!
  • IATA and ICAO Codes – Airline Codes and Rich Content (Beta)
  • IATACodes – An API to get IATA codes database and more.
  • Indonesian Train Schedule – Jadwal Kereta – This API is free to use as we host it in free appharbor. You can add up to your 5 favorite origin-destination. We get the data from tiket.kereta-api.co.id. So as long as we do not violate their rules, you can still have the data.
  • iRail – Search for train trips in Belgium using the iRail API. You can search for train departures in a certain station and search for all the stations in Belgium.
  • IRCTC and Indina Railway – We have created this API to help out the developer looking for railway API and we are not affiliated to indian railways in any form and this is not an official API also.
  • Kajak – API to query realtime Flights prices, Hotels booking and Cars hiring
  • Qtravel Search v1.0 – Qtravel.pl is a full-text search engine of vacation packages provided by Polish tour operators.
  • Railway Trains – India – Search Indian Railway trains by either train number or it’s name.
  • Route Planner Apis – A set of apis to solve common vehicle routing problems including: simple vrp, capacity constrained vrp (cvrp), multiple pickup-delivery cvrp, and others.
  • SEPTA – Provides hackathon-style access to the SEPTA API. Allows introspection of the SEPTA locations and routes, and provides basically-realtime data on delays, alerts, vehicles, and routes.
  • Skyscanner Car Hire Live Prices – Retrieve live prices for car hire providers.
  • Skyscanner Flight Search – The Sky Scanner API lets you search for flight & get flight prices from Skyscanners database of prices, as well as get live quotes directly from ticketing agencies.
  • Such Flight – Flight Search API. Searches in Airblue. Other flights coming soon PIA, Shaheen Air.
  • TrailAPI – Information and photos for tens of thousands of outdoor recreation locations including hiking and mountain biking trails, campgrounds, ski resorts, ATV trails, and more.
  • Travel Advisory – This is a simple REST API that replies with an UTF8 encoded JSON Object. This API provides you with a daily updated list of country advisories. These advisories contain a risk value which describes how dangerous a country is from a travellers perspective. This data is available for every country.
  • Tripit – TripIt organizes travel plans into an itinerary that has all of your trip details in one place.
  • Tsaboin Cams – With our API, you can extend your projects (check terms and conditions for more details) by connecting to our servers for traffic details around bus-stops and for live traffic cams.
  • UberDelivery – Request an Uber delivery from within your app
  • UberRide – Request an Uber ride from within your app.
  • webcams.travel – The World’s Largest Landscape Webcam API
  • World Airports – Find a list of airports matching the search string with Airport Name, Code or Location.
  • Zumata – ZUMATA is a new approach in B2B travel API’s. In a few simple steps, you can be getting real-time travel pricing, availability and booking worldwide via simple API calls.
4.7/5 - (29 votes)

View Comments

  • Hi,

    Nice blog!!

    Trawex can also provide API interfaces to help the travel platforms automate all end-to-end processes from search pricing to ticket issuance. For more details please visit on Trawex.

  • Nice list - thanks for making the effort of writing it down. Travel APIs are really of a great help to the modern ecommerce, especially when there's a "free" option and the ability to combine more than one API.

  • Hi,
    Thanks for sharing this useful information.

    FlightsLogic also provides the FlightsLogic provides Flight API, Airline Consolidator, Flight Aggregator to the travel agents, tour operators and travel companies worldwide.

  • Hi,
    Thanks for sharing such important information in a list here.

    It is very helpful and good source. Nibble Software also providing travel api & Integration service for flight, hotel , car and connected list of travel companies globally.

  • Hello RapidAPI Team,

    Good Work ! Thanks for sharing such a valuable information. Travel API Hub is one of the emerging global brand in travel api development & integration services for GDS, Flight , Hotels worldwide not only to automate all end-to-end processes, But available with variety of features focused specially on how to destroy travel business competition.

  • Hi,
    Thanks for sharing such important information in a list here.

    It is very helpful and good source. fareobox Software also providing travel api & Integration service for flight and connected list of travel companies globally.

  • I just checked the article, and this is stupendous. Thanks for listing the flight and travel API in this article. Our travel agency software solutions provide multiple API integrations like flight, hotel, car etc. for the travel agency and tour operators in a worldwide.

  • Cities API, from the beloved travel site RoadGoat, provides inspiring context about towns, cities, regions, and countries (neighborhoods coming soon). Content includes hand-picked high-quality photos, known-for tags (such as foodie or LGBT-friendly), editorial descriptions, Covid stats, safety rating, budgetary rating, and more. It also provides stats from RoadGoat’s user community, such as average rating.

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