It's interesting that they employ a dozen flight searchers who manually look all day. Are there any flight prices APIs that can be scraped, looking for significant outliers?
> Great question. We get this one a lot and have been approached by quite a few developers who say they could easily build us something like this.
Is it possible? Sure.
Would it be better? I doubt it.
Say we use Google's flight API. The cost per query is 3.5 cents. Departure airports X destination airports X available dates X 3.5 cents = a ridiculous amount of money.
Or we build a scraper. It would be cheaper than the API, but we'd still need the human element to make sure it's actually a good deal. We take into account number of stops, airlines, etc.
I see potential for a computer/human combo in the future, but right now our flight searchers are doing great and we don't feel that automating the process would make the business significantly better.
