Nowadays, online travel platforms have become valuable sources of information for the continuously growing aviation industry. Travelers and travel agencies are always searching for travel information like cheaper flights, best destinations, and any available offers through such platforms. That travel information search provides valuable insights about recent popular flights, ticket prices, and destination trends. But when the number of sources increases, it will be difficult to derive accurate insights. We can use an API that acts as a central point of information to retrieve such data from useful sources to solve this problem.

The Flight Data API  is one such robust API that provides different travel insights. Therefore, anyone looking to integrate travel insights for their website or blog can get the maximum benefits from this API.

What is the Flight Data API?

Flight Data API is an API that provides travel insights for your travel website or blog. The API uses cached user searches in Aviasales.ru and Jetradar.com  for the last 48 hours.  Its list of endpoints provides useful information such as flight price history, cheapest tickets, flight price trends, popular destinations, and many more.

Moreover, the API is completely free. It supports various programming languages such as Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, and Javascript. In this article, we will see how to use this API with multiple programming languages and SDK.

How does the Flight Data API work?

Flight Data API works using simple API logic. It sends the request to a specific endpoint and obtains the necessary output as the response. When sending the request, it includes ‘x-Access-Token,’ ‘x-RapidAPI-key,’ and ‘x-RapidAPI-host’ as authentication parameters to validate its authenticity. The API requests body contains the parameters required to process it. Once the API server has received the request, the back-end application will process the request. It will retrieve the required information from a database, formulate the response, and send it to the client in JSON format.

Target Audience for the Flight Data API

Travel Application and Website Developers

Travel application developers can integrate this API to provide notifications about recent flights trends for users, especially for frequent travelers and travel agencies. Its various endpoints enable providing a comprehensive view of flight trends to the user. This API requires only a few lines of code, and integration to an application is pretty straightforward. Since it supports multiple programming languages, it has widespread usability.

Learners

Learners, especially those who research flight data trends, can get information straight from this API. Since this API is completely free, anyone who learns about flight trends can use it at no cost.

How to connect to the Flight Data API Tutorial – Step by Step

Step 1 – Sign up and Get a RapidAPI Account.

You can use RapidAPI to search and connect to thousands of APIs using a single SDK, API key, and Dashboard. RapidAPI is the world’s largest API marketplace used by more than a million developers worldwide. 

To create a RapidAPI account, go to rapidapi.com and click on the Sign Up icon. You can use your Google, Github, or Facebook account for Single Sign-on (SSO) or manually create an account.

Step 2 – Search the API Marketplace

Next, Navigate to the Marketplace and search for “Flight Data API.” Then, select the ‘Flight Data API” from the search results.

Step 3 – Get the API Access Token 

To use this API, you must provide your token in the ‘X-Access-Token’ header. To obtain a token go to  https://www.travelpayouts.com/programs/100/tools/api.

Step 4 – Test the API 

After loading the API page, navigate to the ‘Endpoints’ section of the API page, which shows all the available endpoints. Then, select the endpoint you want to test and add the required values for the parameters. Each API endpoint has code snippets in multiple languages, and it automatically adds the API keys, host, and accept parameters. 

Finally, click on the “Test Endpoint” Button to test the API. Upon successful testing of an API endpoint, you will get the response with a 200 status code. It will output an error code and message if there is an error in the request. For example, you get the following response for its “GET calendar of prices for a week” endpoint.

Flight Data API Endpoints

Currently, RapidAPI provides several endpoints in Flight Data API.  

Flight Data API v1

Flight Data API v1 GET endpoints gives you information like cheapest tickets, popular airline routes, popular directions, etc. The following tables display all the endpoints and descriptions of their parameters. 

Endpoints

Parameter definitions

Flight Data API v2

Flight Data API v2 GET endpoints give you information like calendar prices, special offers, prices for alternative routes, etc. The following tables display all the endpoints and descriptions of their parameters.

Endpoints

Parameter definitions

Flight Data API JSON files

Flight Data API JSON files endpoints give you data arrays in JSON format for information like a list of routes, countries, airports, alliances, etc., from a database. You do not need to specify any parameters except the access token. 

Endpoints

Integrating the Flight Data API to an Application

This section will see how to integrate the Flight Data API  into a software application with Python, PHP, Ruby, and Javascript providing example code snippets from the API site. We will be using its “Cheapest tickets grouped by month” endpoint throughout all the code snippets.  

In each code, you must define values for the ‘X-Access-Token,’ ‘X-RapidAPI-key,’ and ‘X-RapidAPI-host’ parameters and include them in the request header. You can take these values from the API website.

Python Code Snippet (requests)

First of all, install the ‘requests’ python module on your computer. The following python code uses the “requests” library to send a GET request to the endpoint. Define the mandatory search term in the “query string” variable. Then use the URL, header, and the query string in the Request object’s request method to send the API call programmatically. You can also use requests.post method for this purpose.

import requests
 
url = "https://travelpayouts-travelpayouts-flight-data-v1.p.rapidapi.com/v1/prices/monthly"
 
querystring = {"origin":"LED","destination":" MOW","currency":"RUB","length":"3"}
 
headers = {
    'x-access-token': "xxxxx",
    'x-rapidapi-key': "cJvLRNK0GfdM9WSMbQe3inU7REn8JVy5",
    'x-rapidapi-host': "travelpayouts-travelpayouts-flight-data-v1.p.rapidapi.com"
    }
 
response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, params=querystring)
 
print(response.text)

PHP Code Snippet (HTTP v2)

First, create a client and a request class object. Then you need to set the API url, request method, query string containing the search keyword, and the header separately from the request object. Finally, send the request through the client objects’ send method. 

<?php
 
$client = new http\Client;
$request = new http\Client\Request;
 
$request->setRequestUrl('https://travelpayouts-travelpayouts-flight-data-v1.p.rapidapi.com/v1/prices/monthly');
$request->setRequestMethod('GET');
$request->setQuery(new http\QueryString([
  'origin' => 'LED',
  'destination' => ' MOW',
  'currency' => 'RUB',
  'length' => '3'
]));
 
$request->setHeaders([
  'x-access-token' => 'xxxx',
  'x-rapidapi-key' => 'cJvLRNK0GfdM9WSMbQe3inU7REn8JVy5',
  'x-rapidapi-host' => 'travelpayouts-travelpayouts-flight-data-v1.p.rapidapi.com'
]);
 
$client->enqueue($request)->send();
$response = $client->getResponse();
 
echo $response->getBody();

Ruby (net::http)

Suppose you are using Rubys’ net::http module, import OpenSSL and URI modules in the beginning. In this instance, bypass SSL certification verification by setting it to ‘VERIFY_NONE..’ Unlike in the above code examples, you can directly set the search keyword in the query string along with the URL.

require 'uri'
require 'net/http'
require 'openssl'
 
url = URI("https://travelpayouts-travelpayouts-flight-data-v1.p.rapidapi.com/v1/prices/monthly?origin=LED&destination=%20MOW&currency=RUB&length=3")
 
http = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
http.use_ssl = true
http.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
 
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(url)
request["x-access-token"] = 'undefined'
request["x-rapidapi-key"] = 'cJvLRNK0GfdM9WSMbQe3inU7REn8JVy5'
request["x-rapidapi-host"] = 'travelpayouts-travelpayouts-flight-data-v1.p.rapidapi.com'
 
response = http.request(request)
puts response.read_body

Javascript (Axios)

Integrating this API into a Javascript application is pretty straightforward and requires a few lines of code. The following code snippet shows how to call this API using its ‘axios’ module. You can define the parameters, url, headers, and the request method in one javascript object and use Axios. The request method is to send the request and retrieve the response.

import axios from "axios";
 
const options = {
  method: 'GET',
  url: 'https://travelpayouts-travelpayouts-flight-data-v1.p.rapidapi.com/v1/prices/monthly',
  params: {origin: 'LED', destination: ' MOW', currency: 'RUB', length: '3'},
  headers: {
    'x-access-token': 'xxxx',
    'x-rapidapi-key': 'cJvLRNK0GfdM9WSMbQe3inU7REn8JVy5',
    'x-rapidapi-host': 'travelpayouts-travelpayouts-flight-data-v1.p.rapidapi.com'
  }
};
 
axios.request(options).then(function (response) {
  console.log(response.data);
}).catch(function (error) {
  console.error(error);
});

Alternatives to the Flight Data API

Following are the similar Flight Data APIs available on the RapidAPI site.

• Aviation Reference Data API – This API allows you to query airports, airlines, and aircraft types by IATA and ICAO codes
• Skyscanner Flight Search API lets you search for flights & get flight prices from Skyscanner’s database and get live quotes directly from ticketing agencies.
• AeroDataBox API – From this API, you can get information like flight status, delays, schedules. Airports, runways, delay index, statistics, distance, and flight-time between.

Benefits of the Flight Data API

Extensive Functionality

This API is not limited to only a single functionality. It covers many flight insights like flight price trends, popular airports, destinations, offers, etc. Therefore, developers can build comprehensive applications integrating them without depending on other APIs.

Easy to Integrate

Almost all the endpoints of Flight Data API  need just a few parameters. Thus, you do not have to spend a lot of time writing complicated code. In addition, you can find example code snippets in many programming languages with two or more frameworks or modules. Because of this simplicity, even someone with little to no background using APIs can master the API reasonably quickly.

Summary

Flight Data API  is a comprehensive and robust API that you can use to get a lot of helpful information about flight data insights. This article discussed how to subscribe for it, its available endpoints, benefits, for whom it will be helpful, and provided sample code snippets in Python, PHP, Ruby, and Javascript to show how to use it in an application.