Where do apps like Skyscanner and the like get flights?

Question

API

For example, if you want to search and sell products in your application, where do you get all this data?
Or do you need to bypass each ticketing service, look for their API and connect it separately to your application? And how to take a percentage of the sales of these same tickets?

Answer 1

I'll quote myself.

Look, air tickets (as well as railway tickets) are characterized by two things:
a) Historically, systems are primarily focused on serving offline cash desks
b) API is extremely reluctant to give everything and only starting from certain volumes (thousands of tickets per day), because for them it is both financial and technical risks.
The options for building your own ticketing site are as follows (in decreasing order of costs):
1. Direct contracts with airlines
2. Direct contracts with large GDS - the list is on the wiki
. The order of costs is from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
3. An agreement with one of the GDS aggregators, for example nemo.travel or https://www.tch.ru/ru-ru/Pages/Home.aspx
The order of costs is thousands to tens of thousands of $
4. Referral agreement with one of the sites directly connected to the GDS (for example, with https://www.onetwotrip.com/ru/ , www.ozon.travel , etc.
The cost is about zero, but not everyone has public affiliate programs, you need 5. Referral
agreement with one of the sites working according to the 4th scheme, for example with https://www.aviasales.ru/affiliateprogram
The order of costs is about zero, there are usually public affiliate programs
. PPS
With intercity buses - everything is much better, the market is in the stage of explosive growth, there are options to connect according to 2-3 schemes without significant costs, details on skype dentelis who needs it.

How to find the base for the airline ticketing site?

@Div100 And about the percentage, I mean, like buying tickets on my own behalf?
That is, the buyer wants to buy a ticket, makes a purchase, and at the same time he sends money to the application’s account, the application itself buys on its own behalf, while leaving part of the money as a percentage, and gives him the purchase data?

If we are talking specifically about an independent sale (options 1-3), then most likely it will be a subagency agreement with a supplier.
The money flow scheme can be very different: it can be + - as you wrote, or there may be a strict requirement on the part of the supplier to separate financial flows - in this case you use a payment system that can do this (and is approved by your supplier) and part of the money when paying for the ticket immediately goes to GDS directly, your profit goes to you.

Answer 2

The API is used to request ticket data from suppliers.
Exactly.
You should already be able to see this.