Travel
October 20, 2021

How Web Scraping is Used to Extract Data from OTAs?

Customer satisfaction is the most important factor for any service-oriented business. And if you own a travel company, then you must ensure that your customers have the finest vacation experience. After all, satisfied customers will mean repeat business, and they are the most valuable asset for attracting new clients and increasing revenue.

When it comes to vacation planning, flight ticket rates are one of the most important influencing elements, alongside lodgings and activity packages. As a result, network operators need to provide the greatest travel plans to their customers. As companies grow more data-driven, they examine what their competitors are just doing, as well as how airlines and online travel agencies set ticket pricing and use this information to make better decisions.

Scraping flights and tickets data from various platforms such as OTAs, airlines, and competitors is an effective method to enhance your decision. And this could be done using web scraping.

Advantages of Scraping Flight Data

Depending on every opinion, flight data from OTAs and other external resources have various short-term and long-term benefits.

1. Real-Time pricing updates

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Ticket costs for airlines change a lot, especially during peak travel season and holidays, when they might alter by the minute. If your consumers rely on external sites for flight details, it's critical that the data is always up to date and correct. Customers should not be charged more or less than the effective prices. While savings are always appreciated, you must also consider their economic state. You can always display correct, real-time flight data thanks to automated repeating extractions from your data sources.

2. Price Comparing

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When you aggregate airfare information from several OTAs, airlines, and competitors in the same system or dataset, it's easy to compare costs. This ensures that you or your customers never miss out on the finest discounts in terms of lower airfares, shorter flight lengths, paths with the fewest layovers, etc. Using web scraping to keep track of your competition allows you to examine their pricing techniques and change your fares to reach fair pricing.

3. Market Intelligence

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You can obtain a fair picture of how airplane ticket rates move year-round by gathering and examining flight information from multiple sources throughout time. It is simpler to spot trends, such as how readily available flights are during holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, and how costs compare to the rest of the year.

Furthermore, reviews are an important tool for determining customer opinion. Using recent trends and sentiment research to develop and prioritize advertising campaign methods helps guarantee that your focus and contact the proper audience, provide the finest flight packages, and get the most out of your efforts.

Reasons Behind Using Web Scraping Service to Fetch Airline Data?

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The following are the basic information fields you'll need for retrieving flight and airfare information:

  • Airline company
  • Flight name/Id
  • Origin and Destination airport names/codes
  • Total flight duration
  • Price

Although most of the information listed above is easily accessible, manually compiling and entering it into spreadsheets or databases is time-consuming, mistake, and simply not feasible. Allowing a web scraping service to handle data sourcing on your account is the finest approach with numerous benefits.

1. Easily Customizable

Even the most difficult criteria can be met with the help of data extraction services. They will retrieve any more fields you require in addition to the data points listed above. They will send the data in the most suitable format after the data scraping is completed.

2. Cost-Effective

Thousands of OTAs and airline sites supply data to the most popular flight providers. Charging a fee to each one of your sources of data for API access is both inefficient and pricey.

Scraping services are the ideal cost-effective method for bringing data from all of your sources together in one place.

3. Automation for Continuous Data Flow

As previously stated, it is critical not only to keep records of any updates to flight details but also to guarantee that information is flowing into your system at all times. When working with many data sources, this is one of the most difficult problems to solve.

In this aspect, partnering with DaaS providers like 3i Data Scraping gives you the comfort of mind. They ensure that each of your data sources continues to produce the data you need and routes it to your filesystems effortlessly with a specialized team of specialists focusing on your individual needs.

4. Easily Scaled

As your company grows, you'll need to expand your data sources to include more OTAs and airlines. With the in-house team, your resource constraints will soon become exhausted, and you won't be able to manage the time and energy needed to meet the growing expectations.

On the other end, scraping services are also used to deal with such challenges but will have no trouble scaling your project to meet the increased data demands. They already have committed staff, technology, and infrastructure in place to handle even the most difficult requirements.

5. Overcome Website Restrictions

Many OTAs and flights often impose various limits on access to information, such as barring IP addresses of servers submitting queries, limiting access to a certain quantity of data, geo-restricting their content, and so on.

When working on other industrial initiatives, data source providers confront similar challenges regularly. As a result, professionals are well-versed in the methods for circumventing these limitations and will ensure that your access to the original OTA and its flight data is not affected.

For any queries, contact 3i Data Scraping, now!!