Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data
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.