Google Flights is one of the most popular flight platform for users to search airlines and compare rates. The platform was created as a result of Google's acquisition of ITA Software and its QPX API in early 2010s. Google used to offer an API for the flight data as per the contract from ITA software. In 2018 Google terminated the flight API unfortunately.

Google flight is a complicated site to work with, there are people extacting the flight data with tools like selenium/puppeteer/playwright or any other web driver related automation tools. But using those kind of tools is really not a good idea and could be extremely unfriendly to the target site, because:

1.Selenium/Puppeteer/playwright opens up a real browser(either headless or non-headless) to load the webpage, once page load could mean 10 -100 web requests generated behing the scene. However, out of those 10-100 requests, only 1 or 2 of them returns the data you really need. The rest traffic is either images or js rendering code or 3rd party api calls. 2.With our approach, we harvest the data 10-100 times more efficient than using selnium/puppeteer/playwright, and also the web traffic generated is quite minimal.

3.Selenium/Puppeteer/playwright are big computing resource eaters!! It can easily eatup your cpu and memory and threfore significantly compromising the performance of your crawlers.

At barkingdata, we use an AI based solution to extract the Google Flight airlines data. If you are interested in airlines data, just contact us and we can help you build a customized flight dataset.