I have a few ideas to implement in the travel booking industry, combining flights, hotels, and car rentals.
I find very few information about how to start. There are limited amount of APIs available, and surprised because it’s a huge, and growing industry.
Are they giving the same price for every booking site? I’m surprised why for example the largest booking site can provide very good prices while they are charging 10-15% commission.
Are these contacting hotels/flight providers/car rental companies one by one to register with them? (In the beginning at least, I assume later the hotels contact them)
Are the hotels etc set their prices independently one by one for each travel agency? How are they negotiate prices?
My ideas are:
• flexible destination, and dates, and duration of stay - based on my research many people don’t have a specific destination to go to, neither specific dates. The possible combinations of different locations, and every combination in a month for a week holiday are enormous.
• get the best deal not only for hotel separately, and flight separately, with car rental optionally, but based on the above flexible options, get the best package - the best price for a hotel for a given destination, and period might not be the best price for flight
• flexible price - with free cancellation a hotel price may go down by time - if it goes up, then the customer reserved the price at a given point, if it goes down, the service would rebook at the lower price, keep some of the discount, but the customer gets a discount too everyone’s happy.
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