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Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data

• camus2 9y ago
  Any alternative API?
  • imartin2k 9y ago
    I am not aware, at least not of one which is offered for free (one a base level). I have been using this one for Python practice. Sad to see it go.
    • pedrobc 9y ago
      My company xmltravelgate.com offers a flight API (search & book) with many direct airlines (low cost and NDC) and 3 GDS already integrated, although you do need a contract with them... We're releasing a new aggregated flight API and flight cache API (only price & availability, no booking, no contracts) based on GraphQL scheduled for January. Feel free to contact me for more details.
      • nathancahill 9y ago
        This is me contacting you. Please share details, very interested.
        • pedrobc 9y ago
          Please send email to info at xmltravelgate.com and mention HN, thanks!
  • wbeckler 9y ago
    Check out Fareportal, which has a full-featured API for flights with both search and booking ability. https://www.fareportallabs.com/Home/DownloadDocs#0 https://www.fareportallabs.com/Home/DownloadDocs#0 I'm happy to answer questions as I'm helping several companies switch over to Fareportal at the moment.
  • joelhaasnoot 9y ago
    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 https://developer.lufthansa.com/docs - IAG (Iberia/British Airways): https://developer.ba.com/ https://developer.ba.com/ - AirFrance/KLM https://developer.airfranceklm.com/ https://developer.airfranceklm.com/ - Turkish Airlines: https://developer.turkishairlines.com/ 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...
• timdorr 9y ago
  "You don't need to take any action. However, if you are actively using this product you may want to find an alternate solution before April 10, 2018." So, you do need to take action? That's a pretty terrible set of FAQs. They should at least provide a list of alternatives.
  • JoblessWonder 9y ago
    I mean, you don't NEED to take any action... if you don't care that your data feed no longer exists.
    • kbenson 9y ago
      Yes. I'm sure many, possibly even the majority, of clients subscribed to the API don't have it in active use. There's a bunch defunct side projects out there. This notice likely went out to every account with a subscription to this API.
  • saurik 9y ago
    It is even better, as the question is "What steps should I take?", which is a very "just tell me what I need to do, step by step" way to ask this question, and yet the answer doesn't give you any concrete suggestions for what to do now other than "feel am impending sense of doom". (Though given that Google knows the only people who care are people they likely consider to be competitors--as the whole reason they bought ITA in the first place was to obtain the power that comes from vertical integration--that is likely exactly what was going through their minds when they wrote that: "let's be particularly unhelpful".)
    • kbenson 9y ago
      This is one of those cases where "let the market sort it out" is likely the right answer. If someone has an alternative, you can bet they are going to capitalize on this, and Google telling you where to go may actually hurt more than help (who days their suggestion is best?), and if there isn't an alternative, there's not much to say.
  • 9y ago
• quartz 9y ago
  Skyscanner also recently made it tougher to get at live airfare data through their API[1]. Sad to see providers disappear for this. Not sure what the alternatives are now. [1] https://support.business.skyscanner.net/hc/en-us/articles/212682245-Why-do-I-get-an-error-when-accessing-the-Flights-Live-Pricing-API- https://support.business.skyscanner.net/hc/en-us/articles/21...
  • wbeckler 9y ago
    One alternative is Fareportal, which has a full featured API for flights with both search and booking ability. https://www.fareportallabs.com/Home/DownloadDocs#0 https://www.fareportallabs.com/Home/DownloadDocs#0 I'm happy to answer questions as I'm helping several companies switch over to Fareportal at the moment.
    • ezekg 9y ago
      Thanks for the link. Definitely looks like a good alternative to QPX (and Skyscanner since they don’t like to respond to partner applications). There’s also https://www.kiwi.com https://www.kiwi.com, which seems to offer a nicely documented partner API.
• 4ad 9y ago
  I think they want to shutdown the matrix[1]. They already discontinued the matrix smartphone app a year back. I will be truly lost (quite literally) once matrix is unavailable. I plan out very complex trips and only the matrix can do it. [1] https://matrix.itasoftware.com https://matrix.itasoftware.com
  • nathancahill 9y ago
    I really hope not. I'm in the same boat (plane?) as you.
  • pinko 9y ago
    Likewise. I would gladly pay to continue using Matrix. I can't imagine planning flights without it.
  • foota 9y ago
    Try kiwi.com? It's not as good I'm, but is fairly full featured. You can also use a spreadsheet to generate search urls for Google flights.
    • nathancahill 9y ago
      The features I most need are: routing options, fare class codes and multi-month fare calendars. Only Matrix has all 3 as far as I know. Often, when I call the airline to book a great itinerary I found on Matrix, the airline won't believe the time/price. I'll have to convince them to trust me and make an itinerary from the flight numbers. It's often faster and cheaper than anything on the airline's websites.
      • lavezzi 9y ago
        you've probably seen it already but bookwithmatrix.com is also very useful to get pricing based on ITA fare quotes.
  • rb808 9y ago
    I've seen that before but didn't keep it - What's the difference between that and regular google flights?
• nathancahill 9y ago
  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).
  • joelhaasnoot 9y ago
    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 https://developer.lufthansa.com/docs - IAG (Iberia/British Airways): https://developer.ba.com/ https://developer.ba.com/ - AirFrance/KLM https://developer.airfranceklm.com/ https://developer.airfranceklm.com/ - Turkish Airlines: https://developer.turkishairlines.com/ 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...
  • lucasverra 9y ago
    Iata's been working on something for the last couple (5) of years --> http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/airline-distribution/ndc/Pages/default.aspx http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/airline-distribution/ndc/Pages/... in 2017 alone they've organized 3~5 hackathons, my bet is that there is LOTs of money to make it grow (disclaimer : Paris IATA hackathon atendee and chosen project)
• OzzyB 9y ago
  So is this a new opportunity for someone to fill this need, or this is a really hard service to offer? As per other comments: doesn't seem to be much choice in the space anymore.
  • danvoell 9y ago
    Hard service to offer. The guy who originally built this and sold it to Google has posted on HN a few times about the intricacies of the industry.
    • OzzyB 9y ago
      Just did a little sleuthing and see that it was ITA[0] that Google acquired in 2010/11. Also I found this person on HN that looks like the guy you mentioned?[1] Lots of interesting comments for bedtime reading there. In any case, It's pretty clear that this is not some small insignificant service, which makes this somewhat blazé announcement of it's imminent shutdown (just find another service!) all the more infuriating. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dmbaggett https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dmbaggett
      • itamarst 9y ago
        It's quite possible that if you have large pile of money you can still get it (https://www.itasoftware.com/ https://www.itasoftware.com/ has list of existing customers, and Sales button at bottom - I have no reason to think that customer list isn't still valid.) And at a very minimum Google is using this for Google Flights, that's what they bought ITA for. There's other companies that will sell you the data, if you have a large pile of money (Sabre, Amadeus, etc.). So it's problematic insofar as they're making it much harder for random small companies and hobbyists to get it. On the other hand, pre-acquisition this public API didn't exist. So it's not clear Google's acquisition of ITA made things worse in any way. (Disclaimer: used to work for ITA. Have no inside knowledge of how things work now.)
    • FreezerburnV 9y ago
• acomjean 9y ago
  Part of Googles killing all of ITA public facing software and keeping the rest to itself. Google purchased ITA in 2010. QPX was used by a lot of online travel companies.[1] Already canceled was the flight booking software for airlines. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software oddly the guy teaching the hadoop class is retired from ITA and talked about them a little in class last night.
  • teemwerk 9y ago
    From the wikipedia entry and the court documents it references, Google was required to make ITA's software available for licensees for five years after the judgement in October 2011.
• danvoell 9y ago
  My guess is that they are making peanuts selling the API service vs. the handy-dandy rich snippet which allows you to buy tickets (airline, hotel and coming soon packages) right from the SERPs.
  • michaelbuckbee 9y ago
    Or https://www.google.com/flights/ https://www.google.com/flights/
• helloguillecl 9y ago
  Six months ago, I started developing a Flight Alerting service for QPX Express API. I was always skeptical as to how long would they keep this API running, since it was a byproduct of a previous acquisition. But I said to myself, wishfully thinking: Why would they shut down this and lose their clients trust in developing with their APIs? Sadly, I was again proven wrong.
  • FeepingCreature 9y ago
    If a client hasn't learned by now, they're not gonna learn from this either. For niche apis Google has no trust left to burn, because all trust in its products is either already burnt or inflammable.
    • helloguillecl 9y ago
      Sadly true
    • stefano 9y ago
      And yet, there are still a lot of companies using and relying on Google APIs and cloud services. I don't understand why there is still so much trust in them after they've shown multiple times they will terminate services with little warning. And no, I don't consider 1 year a long enough warning for something that has no clear drop-in substitute. If you're using a Google service, you must be prepared for when they'll pull it from under your feet. And if you need to prepare for that, why use that service to begin with if an alternative exists?
      • cortesoft 9y ago
        Isn't that true of ANY company relying on some service from some other company? What makes you so sure that this alternative service is more likely to stay around than one of Googles? The reason we think that Google EOLs so many more APIs than other companies is because Google itself is still around. Some other company's API wont be EOLd, instead they will just go out of business (or they will be bought by someone who will shut down the service).
• tomc1985 9y ago
  When you build your house out of sticks (other people's cloud apis) can you really get angry when the big bad wolf comes to blow it down?
  • helloguillecl 9y ago
    Bad analogy. Here you are building your house relaying on services you cannot provide yourself (Water supply, electricity), You could at least feel a bit betrayed.
    • tomc1985 9y ago
      There are guarantees associated with water and electrical services, and their sudden disappearance is grounds for riots and civil unrest. Cloud services are not conceived or configured for durability beyond financial stability, which makes them inherently unstable. A poor foundation for anything you want to last or not be bothered with.
      • monkmartinez 9y ago
        Not really. I never signed a SLA with my power or water company. We know they try to keep the service(s) "up"... but if they can't, they can't. Sadly, people riot and fight over much less than the loss of an API... just wait until black friday or some team wins or loses a game.
        • stefano 9y ago
          > I never signed a SLA with my power or water company. We know they try to keep the service(s) "up"... but if they can't, they can't. In Italy, these services must be provided by law. Even small mountain towns where it's not profitable to provide the service must be covered. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't the case in any first world country.
          • plandis 9y ago
            I think you might be misunderstanding. You're seem to be talking about how much coverage is required for utilities. The person you're responding to appears to be specifically talking about the (lack of) guarantees for uptime, recovery, etc... for someone who already has service. In the US, required coverage mandates are up to individual states to set and varies.
• RestlessMind 9y ago
  From [1]: "On April 8, 2011, the US Department of Justice approved the buyout (of ITA by Google). As part of the agreement, Google must license ITA software to other websites for five years." Now that five years are up, Google would want to deny competitors access to that data. Seems like a good startup opportunity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
  • compsciphd 9y ago
    seems a little bit more than 5 years...
    • jdavis703 9y ago
      I wonder if this was five years from the deal closing? Usually the deal doesn't close until after regulators have agreed to not to file a lawsuit (which is what happened on the April 8th 2011 date).
      • vxNsr 9y ago
        That still implies it took them 2 years to close the deal (2018-5=2013) which seems a bit much.
  • throwaway613834 9y ago
    > Now that five years are up 2018 - 2011 = 7?
    • Johnny555 9y ago
      7 > 5, so the 5 years are up.
      • throwaway613834 9y ago
        They've been up for 2 years, so how is it "Now that five years are up, Google would want to deny competitors access to that data"? If that was their reasoning they would've done it 2 years ago. It's 2 years of extra advantage they didn't need to give their competitors, right?
• sshrinivasan 9y ago
  You mean "Googles are"...
• npolet 9y ago
  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 develop in the travel industry. Unless you own the data, working with it is terrible. We ended up building our own little system that merged our own flight data with data from suppliers. The schema some of the suppliers provided was non sensical and it ended up being a really finely tuned system that would break reguarly if one of the data suppliers decided to change it without notice. I spent my days dreaming of a standardized data pool, and while some of the data was standardized, not enough of it was. Thank goodness I'm now working in an industry that we can totally own our data and are not reliant on anyone else for it.
  • lotyrin 9y ago
    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).
    • pishpash 9y ago
      Not coincidentally these are also industries with the most middlemen.
      • jvagner 9y ago
        Mortgages, too...
    • paulie_a 9y ago
      Ive worked with MLS data before. It was terrible. I am currently working with ACH, DDF and I am astounded that our financial system even operates. Because if there is one thing you want in payment processing, it's wildly innacurate and inconsistent data that is lacking documentation.
• devy 9y ago
  Sorry if this is an obvious question, but does that have anything to do with https://www.google.com/flights https://www.google.com/flights for airfare comparison shopping sub site?
  • dflock 9y ago
    Afaik, they use the same underlying data - this is just Google cutting off public access to this data via the API.
• gboudrias 9y ago
  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.
  • Frieshammer 9y ago
    One day Google will shutdown Gmail. Finally then everyone will learn to ignore their non-Advertising services. It's for the best!
    • ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
      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.
      • ernsheong 9y ago
        It’s paid. I’ve never heard of Google shutting down paid services.
        • mgkimsal 9y ago
          google site search, but i'm sure there have been some others.
        • kalleboo 9y ago
          The post we're commenting on right now is about Google shutting down a paid service
      • dazc 9y ago
        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.
• wvenable 9y ago
  We used this service for an internal company flight-booking application. Fortunately, we booked all the flights for this year but I guess we'll need to find another solution if we do this again for another year.
• CPLX 9y ago
  Does anyone know if they are shutting down their legacy consumer web portal? By which I mean this: https://matrix.itasoftware.com 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.
  • datalog19908 9y ago
    I get a Error: SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE when I try to access that.
    • jannes 9y ago
      It's working for me now. Whatever issue they had, it wasn't a shutdown yet.
  • barronlroth 9y ago
    Also my biggest concern. ITA Matrix is a godsend, and Google Flights does not have feature parity.
• psergeant 9y ago
  I almost put significant time and energy into building a product on top of this. I suspect I will never ever ever use GCP for anything important.
  • halflings 9y ago
    This is not part of GCP, and there's tons of big companies [0] like Spotify, Snapchat, Ubisoft... relying on GCP. Google closes projects that are not working, this one probably wasn't. What's the risk with GCP? That they will just give up on Cloud, the department that is growing the fastest? [1] [0] https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/ [1] https://www.inc.com/business-insider/google-alphabet-earnings-report-third-quarter-results-q3-2017.html https://www.inc.com/business-insider/google-alphabet-earning...
• moonbug22 9y ago
  Google throws another product under the bus, hardly news by now, surely?
• skilic 9y ago
  Google shutters another service. Colour me surprised.
• ssegraves 9y ago
  I don't think this necessarily signals the end of Matrix ITA. In fact, QPX Express and the Matrix are completely unrelated. And, "QPX Express was a lower-touch way to let companies start experimenting with QPX without needing full on biz-dev contract cycles", per someone I know with some inside knowledge.
  • dheera 9y ago
    I used to use Matrix but stopped using it after finding that a lot of the time it doesn't actually catch certain deals available only on airline websites themselves. Now I'm back to individually searching every airline website.
    • ssegraves 9y ago
      It recently received a slight update and has been working better. My understanding is that developers are still actively monitoring it.
• 0xbear 9y ago
  QPX is the biggest Common Lisp codebase I have seen in a commercial product. I left Google years ago, so I wonder if it’s still written in Lisp.
• vxNsr 9y ago
  ITT: Most industries are really bad at sharing data in a standardized manner. This isn't really that surprising considering that there aren't that many IT trade groups for specific industries. While I hate sitting in meetings as much as the next guy what this really requires is each industry's insiders forming a trade group and agreeing on coherent[0] standards, anything else and we'll be back here next week/month/year complaining about the same thing. [0]And of course this is where it all falls apart if you can form that trade group, a lot of this hinges on the people acting against their nature, unfortunately.
• joaonunesk 9y ago
  Does anyone know if they will come up with an alternative service? Will flights.google.com continue to exist?
• dx034 9y ago
  Does anyone know a good API for schedules? Most focus on fares which are much more complicated (routing, agreements, availability). I'd like to just get the information of which flights are scheduled. The information is readily available from airports and airlines but so far I haven't found an (appropriately priced) API.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• microdrum 9y ago
  Google: "You don't need to take any action." Department of Justice: "Hold my beer."
• reiichiroh 9y ago
  Can someone identify what apps/services/sites are affected by this? Like Kayak or Hipmunk?
• dagoban 9y ago
  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.
• dagoban 9y ago
  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 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.
• TheIronYuppie 9y ago
  Stupid Question (I work for Google): Why not move to QPX Enterprise, which continues to be supported? https://www.itasoftware.com/ https://www.itasoftware.com/