Overview
Introduction
The Indicative Prices API returns a list of the last seen lowest prices for a given search criteria.
How it's used in Skyscanner
The Flights Indicative API powers our Explore search that gives travelers an overview of prices by location or date. This is useful for low intent, exploratory searches (e.g.: when a traveler doesn't know the destination or the travel dates exactly). The prices shown are cached, and can be up to 4 days old, and may differ from live prices.
We use the Flights Indicative API to populate the prices in the date picker showing the cheapest dates to fly to a destination:
We also use the API to populate the cheapest prices in our "Anywhere" searches:
Endpoint
The /search endpoint takes a search query containing an origin, destination and date. It then returns a list of indicative prices for the given query.
Concepts
Indicative prices
An indicative price is the last seen lowest price for a given route and date. These prices are not retrieved in real time (as opposed to live prices) and are instead cached values. Indicative prices values should be used as rough estimates of the cheapest cost to fly to a destination. If exact prices or a bookable itinerary is needed, please use the live pricing API.
Lowest seen price
This lowest price returned is for 1 adult economy traveler. Included in the response are both indirect and direct flight prices.
How indicative prices are generated
The API retrieves data from a cache that is populated based on the lowest prices seen for a given route and date. Each price is cached for up to 4 days. Each time a traveler searches for a route on a given date, the lowest price for that itinerary is checked against what is stored in the cache. If the newest price is lowest than the last seen value, the cache is updated and the new value is returned by the API.
Request
/search
Required fields
Requests to the /search endpoint need to contain the following:
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
market | Market where search is coming from. E.g.: UK |
locale | Language to be used for the search. E.g.: en-GB |
currency | Currency that the search result prices are returned in. E.g.: GBP |
queryLegs | Contains search request information such as: origin, destination and trip dates. See Query leg guide for more details. |
Optional fields
The following are optional parameters to change the format of the response:
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
DateTimeGroupingType | Allows specifying how the response will be grouped. See the Flights Indicative API reference for possible options. |
Response
The response contains the following fields:
| Date type | Description |
|---|---|
quotes | Shows the lowest prices for a given search criteria. See details for fields in the Flights Indicative API reference |
carriers | List of carriers referenced in quotes, indexed by carrierId. |
places | List of places referenced in quotes, indexed by entityId. |