One of the simplest ways to step into the travel business is by starting an online travel portal. A crude estimation reveals that 72% of holidaymakers in the UK research online before making a booking. This could be extrapolated to make a sense of holidaymakers in the rest of Western Europe, and North America.

Interestingly, this points out to the fact that having an online travel portal website ready can make you earn quick revenue through affiliate sales.

Building a travel portal calls for relying on data and displaying data in a single screen from various sources. In our case, data can be relied on from online travel agencies, airline websites, and global distribution systems. Any further analysis performed on this data will amount to your website’s USP.

De-mystifying some travel tech-related terminologies like GDS, CRS, OTA, Travel Metasearch Engines here.

Now, how to design such travel portals? Let’s move ahead to learn how you can meet the requirements of your potential customers through a well-designed travel search portal.

How to Build Your Travel Search Web Portal?

APIs. Yes. An API is a foundation that you should lay first, on top of which you can build your desired online travel search portal. An application program interface (API) is an integral tool that is providing a cutting-edge digital customer experience today. It plays the middle man between your customer and the actual source of information, which you consolidate to provide them with the best deals.

Travel APIs allow developers to fetch travel data from aggregator websites, airlines, Global Distribution System, and feed your booking engine with it. Now, if you integrate your booking engine with a payment gateway, then your customers can complete their end-to-end booking activity in one go!

Explore more on Why Businesses of Various Industries Should Invest in API Development by clicking here.

Let’s further explore the top travel APIs that are the most efficient and convenient options you have to begin with your endeavor.

Top 10 APIs to Build-up Your Flight Search Aggregator

Now that you are ready to invest in an API or switch to a new API for your travel portal, next, what you need to know is which one to opt for. There are many to choose from. Below are the top 10 flight search aggregators that you can rely on.

Global Distribution System

Metasearch & OTA APIs

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Popular Travel Websites Tech Stack

Tech Service Provider’s API

1. Amadeus API

Towards the end of 2018, Amadeus launched their new portal Amadeus for developers and decommissioned their old sets of APIs. Currently, Amadeus APIs are offered in two types: Self-service and Enterprise.

Self-Service APIs come to replace the old Travel Innovation Sandbox which had the limitation of not being able to use it for commercial purposes.

• What can you do with them?
• Flight and fare search (including lowest fares, most booked destinations, cheapest dates, and so on)
• Flight booking
• Hotel search and booking
• Airport and city search
• Destination content search
• Trip planning

In addition to these, Enterprise APIs cover all other mediums of transport, Travel insurance booking, Booking management, Queue management, Payment management and Customer profiles.

Using Amadeus travel APIs, you get to enjoy the following features:

• Boost acquisitions: It has a special flight delay prediction API that uses machine learning (ML) techniques to gather all possible data to predict whether there will be any delay in flights, which allows your users to change plans if necessary at any moment. Moreover, it does not leave out any information, such as connecting flights, to guarantee a peaceful journey.
• Boost conversion by dynamically profiling shoppers: Amadeus trip purpose prediction API also uses ML algorithms to understand the purpose of each user’s travel, in turn, helping you provide more personalized services to your customers. For instance, if a user is making non-official trips, then with the help of this API, you can offer information on cheaper flights, hotels, restaurants, and activity suggestions. For travelers who are into official travels, you can recommend business-class services that meet their requirements.
• Secure exceptional quality using smart cache refresh mechanisms, a customized search engine and live availability.
• Amadeus has even more options to satisfy each traveling need of your clients. This self-service API has a free monthly quota. Once exceeding this limit, it follows a pay-as-you-go model pricing where you have to pay according to your use.

Some case studies to explore:

• How Uniglobe Travel met success with Mobile app using Amadeus m-Power technology.
• easyJet’s success in European Business Travel.
• How Amadeus helped Qantas cross-sell their way to new markets.

2. Skyscanner API

With Skyscanner Flights API and its decade-old experience in the field, you will get the the following features:

• Allows for two types of search options. Cached search is searching through the cached data available on the Skyscanner platform. Live search, on the other hand, gives real-time data to your customers from the airlines and their changing fairs, offers, etc.
• Both ways, you can offer your clients the details of flight availability, date and time options, carriers, prices, and other details. It can return the cheapest dates for a given route, the most affordable route, etc.
• Moreover, you can get a free public API key for using the Skyscanner API.
• Supports a variety of geo formats, for easy integration with your existing geo-tagged pages.
• The API is available in a whole range of programming languages, including Python, PHP, Node.js, RapidQL, Ruby, Java, Objective-C, etc. It maintains an active developer community and good documentation so that working on top of it won’t be troublesome for you.

Interesting Case Studies with Skyscanner API:

• Hellotrip Makes Use of Skyscanner’s API Integration.
• Gocompare.com, the UK-based financial services, launched a flight search service, partnering with Skyscanner.
• Seeusoon.io Makes Group Trip Planning Simple With Skyscanner’s API.

3. TripAdvisor API

TripAdvisor has one of the largest travel listings in the world. TripAdvisor Content API is offered only for consumer-facing travel websites and apps.

• The API dataset is accessible only to its licensed partners.
• To get the API key, you have to first create an account. Then, specify your business needs in the given fields in a form, describe your business plans, and wait until you hear from
• TripAdvisor officials about whether your application is approved.
• As per your business plan, it has different types of APIs to provide, including TripAdvisor reviews API, TripAdvisor rating API, and TripAdvisor partner API, and each has different pricing features.
• Also, it has a portal where you can find documentation for all API services it offers.

4. Kayak API

Kayak API is not listed on its website but unofficial on RapidAPI in the name of Kajak.

Along with finding flight details, Kayak API can give information regarding flight searches, hotels, car rentals, and other services as well, offering a wholesome experience to your clients. The API allows you to integrate the kayak.com search data into your web or mobile travel app.

• It is a free API that you can implement in your travel search aggregator to find and compare flights and their prices.
• Kayak API helps search locations, get live flight routes, view and compare flight fares, book hotels, car booking, and more.
• Its services are available across the globe, and it can help your clients make better travel decisions.
• The first 500 queries are free of cost, and its further pricing ranges from US$20 to US$300 per month.
• Kajak API is available in all your favourite languages: Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, Java (Android), C# (.NET), cURL, RapidQL.

5. Kiwi API

This Czech-based OTA has shown tremendous growth across the region for its powerful flight search engine. Kiwi.com API seamlessly sets connections and stopovers, processes low-cost flights, and connects to about 750 carriers, including over 250 low-cost carriers.

Joining their affiliate program, you can use their API to find flight data and make bookings that earn commissions. Their APIs can also be used for Payments.

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Tour Operator Software

Tech-Service Provider APIs

6. FlightStats API

FlightStats APIs are well-documented and coherent. They allow for deep customization to tailor travel software to specific business and UX needs. FlightStats API comes in three offerings: Flex APIs, Trip Data APIs & Travel Waiver services.

Using FlightStats Flex APIs, actual flight data with real-time tracking can be integrated with features like:

• Flight status
• Historical flight status
• Schedules and connections
• Airlines and airports
• Ratings (performance ratings to define which flights are more likely to be on-time between given airports)
• Weather
• FIDS (flight information display systems found in airports)

Next, FlightStats Trip Data APIs focuses on improving the itinerary experience for travelers and travel agents informing them about flight disruptions.

Finally, FlightStats Travel Waiver Services are used to manage widespread travel disruption more coherently. They are used in managing the collection of global airline waivers, matching trips and proactively re-accommodating/refunding passenger tickets.

7. FlightsLogic API

FlightsLogic Flight API connects more than 200 low-cost carriers and over 900 airlines. However, their current area of operation is limited to Europe, North America, Africa, Asia excluding India & China. The API can be integrated with apps and websites.

8. TravelTime API

TravelTime is a platform that helps users find locations by journey time, rather than distance. It can filter points of interest by travel time and show more than one travel shape at a time.

Time-based searching opens up more avenues for personalisation. It employs HTTP Basic API key authentication model and is a single purpose API, with a RESTful architecture. It supports XML, JSON response formats and URI Query String/CRUD request format.

9. Fareportal API

Fareportal is a New York city based travel technology company that operates and manages a number of travel websites. Their API allows developers to work with the backend of new and existing travel programs.

Just like Traveltime API, it employs HTTP Basic API key authentication model and is a single purpose API, with a RESTful architecture. It supports JSON response formats and URI Query String/CRUD request format.

10. Accessone Travel API

AccessOne is one of the fast growing travel tech providers offering paid APIs & free airline booking engine.

AccessOne API has come to be known as the most advanced unified API platform. Integration time is significantly reduced with access to global inventory across all products including GDSs, wholesalers, direct connects, aggregators, channel managers, and more.

This API allows you to get all the content at your fingertips in a common unified format. The business rules are customizable to take control over your content and decide the rules and markups for products by geography, customer location, seasons etc. The built-in hosted caching and tokenization allows for faster and easier access to content while reducing data transfer sizes.

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Custom Travel Websites & API Solutions From ColorWhistle

For building exciting travel portals, companies rely on APIs that readily help them serve their clients by providing all possible flight details in response to their queries. From analyzing third-party websites for flight availability to revealing the deal of the day, travel APIs do contribute a lot to the industry.

ColorWhistle offers the best aggregator solutions.

We understand that you have to rely on third parties to collect data and we make it possible for you through our API solutions. We offer travel XML Integration services which play an important role in running a portal that is connected by multiple suppliers.

If you’re already running a portal and looking to switch over to another API, we understand the importance of web compliance. We make sure to partner with API providers who offer the best available inventory and one that follows strict compliance rules.

We have a team of seasoned developers who are experts in travel API integration for payment, GDS, flight, cruise booking, hotel, social media, and more. We also specialize in booking engine integration.

Feel free to connect with ColorWhistle for any specific API integration and travel website solutions with competitive pricing options. We are also available at 944-278-9110 to answer all of your business queries.