Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by dagoban » Thu, Nov 02, 2017, 10:33 AM UTC

What I still have problems to understand with, who really used QPX Express? I looked at it several times over the year and it basicially only lets you search for flights (oneway, roundtrip, open jaw) but without any "advanced routing codes" But those are the most important ones since you can specify booking class (not to be mistaken with cabin class), operating, marketing carrier, base fare code, layovers, aircraft type,...

Basicially QPX Express was always a paid and also very limited version of matrix.itasoftware.com

Instead the results were much better (and free) just scraping ITA and being able to enter all those advanced routing codes. Great way for finding error fares, fuel dumps, ... And there was no spam check from google's side, no IP request restrictions, no limit, nothing, whatsoever. The code is a bit hard to go with when they changed to ITA v3 but once you figured it out (and it took us only 2 days since we had a working scraper for the previous version) to adjust it to the new code.

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

#192

Post by dagoban » Thu, Nov 02, 2017, 10:37 AM UTC

And for anyone just needing flight, availability, schedule date and having problems to structed standardized data, isn't that what the GDS is for (Amadeus, Sabre, Worldspan,...) There you have almost all carriers (excl. some LCCs), have all the data (availaiblity, schedule, pricing, ...) and its either cheap or free to access. Just have a look at https://developer.sabre.com/docs/read/REST_APIs for example. You don't even need a real GDS account with an office ID, just an API access account.

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

#193

Post by NetStrikeForce » Thu, Nov 02, 2017, 10:57 AM UTC

DannyB2 wrote: post #178

anticodon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is North Korea a threat to humanity?

A possibility exists that North Korea might be able to bait someone into a nuclear war.

Come on, I have no sympathy for NK's regime, but that's victim blaming.

The threat is "baiting someone into nuclear war" and not "having tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and being ready to use them to kill millions of people"? Give me an effing break mate :)

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

#194

Post by sbfeibish » Thu, Nov 02, 2017, 1:25 PM UTC

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…

Seems to me what you describe is a business opportunity. Your business takes on the burden of obtaining the data, and putting it in an easy to use form; for others. There's a company in Pensacola, Fl that's been doing this for years with things like lottery numbers and gas prices.

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

#195

Post by TheIronYuppie » Thu, Nov 02, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

Stupid Question (I work for Google):

Why not move to QPX Enterprise, which continues to be supported? https://www.itasoftware.com/

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

#196

Post by vpribish » Thu, Nov 02, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #93

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…

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…

that was an awesome writeup. I've wrangled finance data and know the pain. Those Porsche blue links are wonderful!

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

#197

Post by junkcollector » Fri, Nov 03, 2017, 12:33 PM UTC

dazc wrote: post #157

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has crossed my mind. I’m a G Suite customer (paid Google docs / gmail etc) and Google makes me nervous the way they shut things down constantly.

GSuite is a perfect subscription business model; they are giving you stuff you will probably never need or use along side something you were already using for free. The cost of a single account is just about small enough to be negligible for a business customer. This is enough to give me confidence that it isn't going to be shut down.

Wave would have made a nice additional to that suite. I miss Google Wave.

I've built 3 projects that relied on Google services/APIs; none of them exist anymore. I will never build another Google based product as long as I live.