
Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data - imartin2k
Google has been offering an API for airfare data at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;qpx-express.<p>I just received this email:<p>&quot;Dear QPX Express API Customer,
After careful consideration, we&#x27;ve decided to shut down the QPX Express API as of April 10, 2018.<p>How this affects you<p>After April 10th, you will not be able to access the API and will no longer be charged for this service. Until then, you will be charged a reduced rate of $0.02 per query for any queries beyond the 50 free daily quota.<p>Next steps<p>You don&#x27;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. If you have any questions about these changes, please don&#x27;t hesitate to contact us at any time.
Sincerely,<p>The QPX Express API team&quot;<p>More info on the shutdown: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;qpx-express&#x2F;faq#EndOfServiceFAQs
======
RestlessMind
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)

~~~
madeofpalk
> Seems like a good startup opportunity.

Last time this was brought up (2011 HN article IIRC), it was discussed how
terribly organised the travel industry is and just how much Smart Work ITA did
and how invaluable it was.

~~~
notahacker
TLDR: Not a startup opportunity.

\- Huge collection of proprietary data which is constantly updated, only
intended to be polled in a certain way and has all kinds of poorly structured
exceptions and routing problems.

\- The booking engines provide good access to _their_ pricing data free of
charge under license to affiliates that book flights through their engine

\- Low value of an API for prices alone and slim chance of acquisition by
Google or the big online travel agents

ITA built exceptional technology rather than an exceptional business.

This API that Google killed presumably because it wasn't making enough revenue
to be worth maintaining was the part of ITA's public facing service they
originally claimed to be "very excited" about at the acquisition stage

------
npolet
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
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).

~~~
i_cant_speel
I deal with MLSs regularly as part of my current job and this was the first
thing that popped into my head when I read the parent comment. They are hell
to deal with and we would pay a good amount of money to anyone who could
standardize all of them and feed them to us in a consistent format.

Half of the time I spend debugging is on figuring out what is going wrong with
different MLSs.

~~~
starik36
I also deal with MLS data and, on our end, it's in pretty good shape.

Of course, there is a whole department devoted to keeping it clean and
consistent, so I don't have to deal with issues that you do.

Now that you mention it, perhaps we should provide an API for MLS data access.

------
helloguillecl
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
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.

~~~
Filligree
Nit: "inflammable" means "can be set of fire". So does "flammable". Yes, I
know.

You want "not flammable", or if you want to be cute you could try
"unflammable".

~~~
mkartic
Looks like the post means 'either already burnt or will be burnt easily'? So
what exactly is your nitpick here?

~~~
Dylan16807
That doesn't make much sense. Why would the easily-burnt trust still be intact
at this point? It's a really weird comment if it wasn't supposed to mean
"already burnt, or unable to burn".

------
timdorr
"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.

~~~
wbeckler
For anybody looking for an alternative, there 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.

~~~
vbo
Looks good. I researched flight data suppliers & GDS companies recently for a
side project and found them either very expensive (QPX falls in this category
- having to pay several cents per query makes it virtually impossible to do
anything creative) or lacking coverage for LCCs in Europe, which is my target
market.

So naturally I'm quite impressed with Fareportal and will give it a try. I did
do a quick search on CheapOair and didn't see Ryanair among the results
(although they do have a flight for that route and date). I know they're icky
about third parties advertising/[re]selling their flights but there's some
suppliers that do carry their flight data (ie Travelfusion, which politely
told me to come back once I have a working product, chicken and egg much?).

I'm not keen to book flights on behalf of users at this point since I have a
(not thoroughly documented) fear that regulatory matters will make it
difficult/expensive to operate an indie OTA but that's TBD.

~~~
dagoban
If you are looking for API access for LCCs, check out
[http://www.azair.eu/](http://www.azair.eu/) They are the best, they have
availability + pricing + schedule +... data from every LCC that is out there
in Europe. I use their regular website myself for all travels within Europe
when flying LCCs since they show you split ticketing options as well as do a
real search when you enter lets say, from France to XXX (for all airports).
Skyscanner does promote the "take me anywhere feature" but it doesnt show you
any real availability data, only displays flights other people have searched
for.

I also got an email the other day from
[http://mystifly.com](http://mystifly.com) which also promotes LCC but I
haven't tested them yet.

------
acomjean
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
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.

------
CPLX
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
I get a Error: SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE when I try to access that.

~~~
jannes
It's working for me now. Whatever issue they had, it wasn't a shutdown yet.

------
quartz
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/21...](https://support.business.skyscanner.net/hc/en-
us/articles/212682245-Why-do-I-get-an-error-when-accessing-the-Flights-Live-
Pricing-API-)

~~~
wbeckler
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
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
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)

~~~
rb808
I've seen that before but didn't keep it - What's the difference between that
and regular google flights?

~~~
jpatokal
The power user interface, which lets you specify all sorts of wacky
constraints any other OTA can't handle.

[https://travelcodex.com/advanced-routing-language-in-
ita/](https://travelcodex.com/advanced-routing-language-in-ita/)

~~~
e0
That's awesome, but once you find an itinerary you want, how do you book the
flight? Do you usually go to the individual airlines' websites and rebuild the
itinerary by hand? Or do you send the 'fare construction' string over to a
travel agent?

~~~
4ad
Depends on the flight, but I usually use a travel agent.

If it's a simple flight, I might use some airline website to book it, but most
often for me it's some thing that you can't book at all on the airlines I use.
I fly into small rural airports and they simply dot not exist on any major
airline's websites.

I give the string to a travel agent and he is able to book the flight no
problem.

------
ssegraves
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
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
It recently received a slight update and has been working better. My
understanding is that developers are still actively monitoring it.

------
gboudrias
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
One day Google will shutdown Gmail.

Finally then everyone will learn to ignore their non-Advertising services.
It's for the best!

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
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
It’s paid. I’ve never heard of Google shutting down paid services.

~~~
kalleboo
The post we're commenting on right now is about Google shutting down a paid
service

------
danvoell
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
Or [https://www.google.com/flights/](https://www.google.com/flights/)

------
nathancahill
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
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...

------
OzzyB
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
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
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
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.)

------
wvenable
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.

------
dagoban
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
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.

------
vxNsr
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.

------
TheIronYuppie
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/)

------
psergeant
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
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-
earning...](https://www.inc.com/business-insider/google-alphabet-earnings-
report-third-quarter-results-q3-2017.html)

------
dx034
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.

------
joaonunesk
Does anyone know if they will come up with an alternative service? Will
flights.google.com continue to exist?

------
microdrum
Google: "You don't need to take any action."

Department of Justice: "Hold my beer."

------
devy
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
Afaik, they use the same underlying data - this is just Google cutting off
public access to this data via the API.

------
camus2
Any alternative API?

~~~
imartin2k
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
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
This is me contacting you. Please share details, very interested.

~~~
pedrobc
Please send email to info at xmltravelgate.com and mention HN, thanks!

------
tomc1985
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
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
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
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
> 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
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.

------
reiichiroh
Can someone identify what apps/services/sites are affected by this? Like Kayak
or Hipmunk?

------
skilic
Google shutters another service. Colour me surprised.

------
moonbug22
Google throws another product under the bus, hardly news by now, surely?

------
0xbear
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.

