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Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#141

Post by NegativeLatency »

closeparen wrote: post #125
Bluestrike2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The car industry is another industry whose data is a series of nightmares. There are a number of services that aggregate inventory data for dealers using them. Sounds great, right? Maybe, if they had halfway decent APIs. Multiple providers--with zero connection to one another, I checked quite carefully after becoming exasperated--somehow managed to independently come to the decision that the best way to make inventor…

>somehow managed to independently come to the decision that the best way to make inventory data available was to push large CSV files to an FTP server you setup. Somehow this is indeed a standard for data transfers between non-tech companies. (The ones that are sophisticated enough not to use fax or email attachments).

I worked on a team at Microsoft that did the CSV over FTP thing in 2013. So some tech companies do it as well. ;)

Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#142

Post by starik36 »

i_cant_speel wrote: post #123
lotyrin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of my time spent being a customer to a real estate MLS. When industries traditionally rented access to information asymmetry, even if those rents have since diminished, there's a lingering cultural momentum not to "show your hand" by playing nice with information (in addition to these not being organizations with the insight and incentives aligned to be attractive or conducive to IT competence).

I deal with MLSs regularly as part of my current job and this was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the parent comment. They are hell to deal with and we would pay a good amount of money to anyone who could standardize all of them and feed them to us in a consistent format. Half of the time I spend debugging is on figuring out what is going wrong with different MLSs.

I also deal with MLS data and, on our end, it's in pretty good shape.

Of course, there is a whole department devoted to keeping it clean and consistent, so I don't have to deal with issues that you do.

Now that you mention it, perhaps we should provide an API for MLS data access.

Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#143

Post by cwilkes »

tyingq wrote: post #59
npolet wrote: post #36

I was part of a team developing a travel product which needed huge amounts of data from flights to car rental... My god the travel industry is a mess in terms of accessible data. It was the biggest pain point. API's would randomly change structure, endpoints would stop working with unknown errors, data would be significantly different across companies for the same data etc... It was a shambles. Never again will I dev…

Didn't like OTA[1], eh? I don't know that other industries are much better though. Ask a healthcare IT person about HL7. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTravel_Alliance

I liked to say “HL7, standard?” As more of a question.

Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#144

Post by timthorn »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #103
Filligree wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: "inflammable" means "can be set of fire". So does "flammable". Yes, I know. You want "not flammable", or if you want to be cute you could try "unflammable".

It's because "inflammable" is a loan word, not a conjugate, and "in-" in French, whence comes the word, means what "en-" means here. Like with most loan words, it's best to just stick to the native word - which is not "flammable" as Merriam tried to invent 200 years ago, but rather "combustible"

But combustible has a very different implication to flammable, which usually means that the substance would catch fire very easily, rather than just being able to self-sustain burning.

Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#145

Post by ulfw »

gboudrias wrote: post #61

Google shuts down a project. I don't think this really stops the press anymore. I'm not familiar with this one, but building your infrastructure on small Google APIs is starting to seem foolish.

Frankly you'd be an idiot to build a business on top of Google services anymore. Just can't rely on anything being around for however long.

Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#146

Post by [deleted] »

npolet wrote: post #36

I was part of a team developing a travel product which needed huge amounts of data from flights to car rental... My god the travel industry is a mess in terms of accessible data. It was the biggest pain point. API's would randomly change structure, endpoints would stop working with unknown errors, data would be significantly different across companies for the same data etc... It was a shambles. Never again will I dev…

[deleted]

Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#148

Post by jannes »

datalog19908 wrote: post #138
CPLX wrote: post #76

Does anyone know if they are shutting down their legacy consumer web portal? By which I mean this: https://matrix.itasoftware.com Please, dear lord I hope not since it's by far my favorite tool to write complex queries to figure out itineraries and pricing for trips.

I get a Error: SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE when I try to access that.

It's working for me now. Whatever issue they had, it wasn't a shutdown yet.

Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#149

Post by joelhaasnoot »

camus2 wrote: post #2

Any alternative API?

A growing number of airlines/airline groups have their own API too. Some of them are quite limited, others are quite good. API limits are generally low unless you beg (or so it seems)

- Lufthansa: https://developer.lufthansa.com/docs

- IAG (Iberia/British Airways): https://developer.ba.com/

- AirFrance/KLM https://developer.airfranceklm.com/

- Turkish Airlines: https://developer.turkishairlines.com/

Many of these all seem to use the Mashery API portal, so I'm guessing it was sort of pitch by Mashery and/or Sabre. Lots of these APIs seem like a trial of airlines trying to get out from under GDS systems...

Re: Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

#150

Post by joelhaasnoot »

nathancahill wrote: post #8

Well, that's terrible. This was the last(?) API that you could sign up for without negotiating with a clearinghouse (which includes contracted numbers of tickets to sell).

A growing number of airlines/airline groups have their own API too. Some of them are quite limited, others are quite good. API limits are generally low unless you beg (or so it seems)

- Lufthansa: https://developer.lufthansa.com/docs

- IAG (Iberia/British Airways): https://developer.ba.com/

- AirFrance/KLM https://developer.airfranceklm.com/

- Turkish Airlines: https://developer.turkishairlines.com/

Many of these all seem to use the Mashery API portal, so I'm guessing it was sort of pitch by Mashery and/or Sabre. Lots of these APIs seem like a trial of airlines trying to get out from under GDS/clearinghouse systems...

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