All About Travel Fare Aggregation

Are you trying to develop a travel price aggregation site or just curious about the overall process? If so, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, you’re going to learn about proxies and web scraping – two crucial elements of fare aggregation.

What Is Travel Fare Aggregation and How Does It Work?

Flight and hotel price aggregation services do not claim ownership of the data shown on their sites. Instead, they sweep through booking websites and gather publicly available information. Then, they compile everything in a neat little package for users to compare.

Having all this information at your tips when you’re trying to plan your next holiday is beneficial. After all, who wouldn’t want to strike a bargain, especially when they’re trying to stick to a budget? Thanks to travel fare aggregators, comparing prices on different platforms doesn’t mean that you need to have 10 different tabs open on your browser.

The Role of Proxies in Travel Price Aggregation

How do travel fare aggregators gather all the valuable data that they show users? Do you think they have a group of interns parsing on every airline and hotel website, looking for the best deals every minute of each day?

Thankfully, things are not as complicated as that. Instead, they utilize something called proxies to source information. The whole process is pretty seamless, but it does take a bit of technical know-how. It also helps to have one of the best proxy providers at your disposal.

Proxy servers stand in between your computer and website servers. Without a proxy, any fare inquiry will arrive at a hotel website with the original PC’s IP address. Now, when you add a go-between in the transaction, the request will appear as though it comes from the proxy.

Anonymous Web Scraping

Every website of an airline, rail company, or hotel employs its own anti-spam mechanism. These sites do not like the fact that online scraping exists because they then have to be even more competitive, price-wise. Therefore, a good proxy server has to bypass specific security features to perform this data collection.

What the proxy does is it hides the web scraper’s IP address and allows anonymous browsing. These proxy servers are essential for travel aggregation, specifically for web scraping. The problem most fare comparison sites face is their IPs getting blacklisted. Without access to price data, aggregators are pretty useless.

Circumvention of Geo-Restrictions

Another reason proxies are essential for travel fare aggregators is that they are able to circumvent geographical restrictions. Many flight and hotel websites restrict their usage to people in certain areas. They might also show different rates and discount offers to users in the United States versus Europe, for example.

By utilizing a proxy, aggregators help travelers find the best deals and perhaps even the most convenient routes by combining flights from different airlines. Here, money is saved, and the best travel plans come to fruition.

Features of a Good Travel Price Aggregator

Building a travel fare aggregation site is definitely a challenge worth undertaking. Now that the world is coming out of a pandemic, people are itching to see new places and visit fun, familiar ones. Here’s what to keep in mind if you’re trying to develop such a tool:

• Utilize a powerful proxy with global access to navigate restrictions on websites.
• Design your site to be user-friendly and with intuitive search options.
• Put yourself in a traveler’s shoes and figure out how your price aggregator will stand out among others.
• Speed is of the essence – make sure your site has the hardware to back it up.
• Ensure that data scraping is constant so that the information on your site is up to date and accurate.
• The more discounts and offers you can show on your site, the better.

Conclusion

Proxies work well for travel fare aggregation. Why? This is because they impersonate actual users from all over the world. Data collection or scraping simply won’t happen on a major scale without the use of proxy services.

Therefore, it would make a lot of sense that picking a trustworthy proxy provider is of utmost importance. Once you have that sorted out, building a travel fare aggregation site is just a matter of writing good code.

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