Even Cheaper Skyscanner

Inspiration

As international students, we frequently fly on the same flights to meet our family. Tired of ongoing guessing game against ryanair, we decided to build a tool that will allow us to find the cheapest possible flight, and tell us when exactly to buy it for it to be the cheapes.

Aside from tracking prices in live time, we are exploiting price differences between different market, since many airlines – even UK ones – give preferential treatment to what they regard as their "core" markets, typically US private and business travelers. Some carriers reserve economy plus-type categories for US corporate passengers, targeting flyers whose expenses have been cut so they can no longer afford business or first class seats.

James Fremantle, industry affairs adviser at the Air Transport Users Council, says: "We'd obviously like UK travellers to get the best-value tickets but it's a market. If an airline wants to offer US or other travellers a better deal, it can. It's not illegal."

And it's also not illegal to take advantage of this very fact. Let's get cracking.

What it does

Even Cheaper Skyscanner scans through all the markets for any flight you want to have by putting in your desired origin, destination, and date. Utilizing the Skyscanner API, we extrapolate the necessary parameters to obtain the genuinely cheapest option for all your flying needs for given time interval, and can track those prices over long time to find when they actually start getting more expansive.

How we built it

We use Python's JSON and Requests libraries to systematically look through and compare all possible market alternatives.

Challenges we ran into

Ordering the line of logic to obtain all necessary information while discarding irrelevant information to not cause memory leaks or trash accumulating. Making the information for specific user requests easily changeable. The API has a limit of 500 requests per minute; hence, when making hundreds of requests we need to keep track of our cooldown period to prevent getting a ValidationError json result, causing an Exception.