Top 5 Flight APIs in 2026

A flight data API is the fastest way to ship reliable search, pricing, and monitoring features in travel products, without building a brittle crawler from scratch. In 2026, most teams use flight APIs for flight prices, aviation data, and availability across major booking platforms, plus operational signals like schedule changes and cancellations to power alerts and smarter decisions.

In this guide, I’ll review five popular options, when each one shines, and what you can do when official endpoints don’t exist. I’ll also show how to use ScrapingBee to scrape results when you need coverage that APIs can’t enable (or when quotas, contracts, or geography get in the way). Let's dive right in!

Quick Answer (TL;DR)

If you need broad coverage fast, start with Amadeus. If you’re building metasearch or flexible itineraries, look at Skyscanner or Kiwi.com. If you monetize, Travelpayouts is built for affiliates. And when an API isn’t available, scrape safely with our How to scrape Google Flights guide

Google Flights API Alternatives

Google Flights is fantastic for end users, but there’s no widely available, “official” public Google Flights API you can just sign up for and receive JSON. So teams usually choose one of these paths:

1. Licensed/partner APIs from aggregators and OTAs (like the providers below). This is the cleanest route when you need consistent terms, SLAs, and the ability to manage quotas and billing at scale.

2. Affiliate/white-label programs that trade flexibility for distribution and monetization. These can be a good fit if your project is content-driven and you want to offer deals while getting paid.

3. Scraping, when you need coverage that isn’t exposed via contract or when you’re validating results from multiple vendors. Scraping can also help you monitor route-level anomalies, sudden changes, or verify what customers actually see.

If you do compare against Google Flights, focus on parity for: airport coverage (including smaller airports), fare rules, schedules, and the “last-mile” redirect flow into the airline/OTA checkout. For a production approach, you’ll typically combine an API for breadth with Google Flights scraper for hard-to-get pages and edge cases (like one way fares on niche routes).

1. Skyscanner API

Skyscanner’s partner offering is designed for travel companies that want to build flight search and surface deals at scale. Their positioning is clear: become a Flight Scraper API partner to power your own travel experience and help users find deals across the world.

Why developers use it

• Good for metasearch-style experiences (think: flexible dates, cabin filters, stops, etc.)

• Strong filtering makes it easier to create a useful UI for each user

• Works well when you need broad coverage across many airlines

Pricing & access
Skyscanner access is typically partner-based (not a simple self-serve checkout), so pricing depends on your commercial agreement and usage. Expect an application flow and onboarding before you can access production.

2. Kiwi.com API

Kiwi’s Tequila platform is popular for apps that need flexible itineraries (multi-city, “anywhere” inspiration, hidden-city-like combinations, etc.). The docs emphasize that you can build your travel applications “for free” once registered and using an API key.

What you get

• Search endpoints (notably /locations and /search) to start quickly

• Useful data formats for frontend consumption (typical REST/JSON workflows)

• Strong cost-optimization logic for complex routing (great when a simple route A→B isn’t enough)

Integration notes
You’ll need an API key (think: your first token) and you’ll usually implement caching at the “search session” stage to keep latency down.

3. Amadeus Travel APIs

Amadeus is a classic choice when you want a single provider that covers more than flights. It is useful if you also sell hotels, transfers, or need destination content. Their self-service catalog spans the full travel lifecycle, including Flight APIs (search, booking, airport info), plus other categories.

Why it’s strong

• Global aggregation and consistent data model

• Built-in “catalog” approach makes it easier for businesses to expand features over time

• Good fit for workflows that need advance planning features (inspiration, pricing trends, etc.)

Pricing
Amadeus pricing is usage-based, and they explicitly mention a 90% discount on flight search calls if you’re creating bookings with Flight Create Orders in production and meet eligibility (paid, uncancelled bookings).

4. Expedia Partner API

Expedia Group’s Rapid API is best known for lodging supply and packaging, but many teams consider Expedia’s partner ecosystem when they want to unify travel inventory and simplify partner onboarding. Expedia describes Rapid as a way to unlock seamless travel API integration and scale your travel experience.

What to expect

• Large inventory and partner tooling

• Practical endpoints for searching and merchandising inventory

• Works well if your roadmap includes hotels (and you want a consistent partner relationship)

Pricing & access
Like many partner platforms, pricing is typically contract-based, and you’ll go through an account and approval process.

If hotels are part of your bundle, check out Airbnb API as a related scraper option.

5. Travelpayouts API

Travelpayouts is a strong fifth option if monetization is part of the plan. Their Data API is positioned as a way to get travel insights, like flight price trends and popular destinations, and you pass your token to authenticate.

Why developers pick it

• Price trend data for content sites and deal pages

• Built-in affiliate ecosystem (links, tracking, payout tooling)

• Useful when you want to generate “best time to fly” pages for millions of queries without real-time shopping on every page load (they note cached/transferred data).

Pricing
You typically earn via affiliate commissions rather than “pay per call,” but you still need to register to get access to the API and credentials.

Using ScrapingBee for Flight Data

APIs are great, until they aren’t. Sometimes you need the exact page your customers see on a booking site, or you’re tracking volatile flight prices that shift multiple times per day. I'm talking about the most valuable real time flight data here. That’s where our scraping stack helps: you can fetch and extract structured flight information even on JavaScript-heavy pages.

Here’s a simple, reproducible workflow using ScrapingBee for Google Flights:

1. Pick a query (example: LHR → JFK), with date, departure, and arrival constraints.

2. Send a single HTTP request through ScrapingBee with JS rendering.

3. Use our data extraction to pull the fields you care about (price, airline, times, stops, baggage notes).

4. Store normalized outputs so you can run analysis later: deltas, outliers, and status monitoring.

Example in Python:

import requests

API_KEY = "YOUR_SCRAPINGBEE_KEY"

url = "https://www.google.com/travel/flights?hl=en#flt=LHR.JFK.2026-06-10;c:EUR;e:1;sd:1;t:f"
params = {
    "api_key": API_KEY,
    "url": url,
    "render_js": "true",
    # Optional: use Data Extraction / AI extraction depending on your plan & needs
}

resp = requests.get("https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/", params=params, timeout=60)
resp.raise_for_status()

html = resp.text
print(html[:500])

Advantages of ScrapingBee

Scraping flight pages is hard because layouts change, anti-bot systems adapt, and modern sites lean heavily on JavaScript. With our Web scraping API, you get building blocks that remove most of that friction: proxy rotation, headless browser support, and AI-powered extraction that adapts when the DOM shifts.

In practice, this helps you keep data accurate during spikes, handle schedule changes gracefully, and build monitoring around operational events (delays, reroutes, cancellations) without babysitting parsers.

Pricing Considerations

ScrapingBee pricing is credit-based with multiple plans (Freelance, Startup, Business, Enterprise), and you can start with 1000 free API calls (no credit card required). You can then pay for a tier that matches concurrency and volume, from small prototypes to production-scale pipelines.

If you’re unsure, start small, measure credits per page type, and scale once you know your per-search cost profile.

Wheels Up: Pick an API, Keep a Scraping Backup

In 2026, the best flight stack usually isn’t “one provider forever.” Use an API (Skyscanner, Kiwi, Amadeus, Expedia, or Travelpayouts) for core coverage, pricing, availability, and routing, then keep ScrapingBee in your toolbox for everything that falls through the cracks: pages without public endpoints, parity checks against what real users see, and faster iteration when booking platforms change.

That backup layer becomes vital when you’re building alerts for delays, re-pricing, or last-minute schedule shifts that impact passengers and support teams. Instead of burning engineering resources rewriting integrations every time a UI updates, you can validate key flows (search → details → checkout) and keep data consistent across sources.

It also helps with debugging: when your API and storefront disagree, scraping gives you the ground truth, giving you a reliable way to explain anomalies, measure drift, and keep the experience stable right up to the very end. And yes, it makes a great “here’s what changed” post in your internal incident notes.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the best flight API for real-time prices?
For real-time shopping, Amadeus and Skyscanner are common starting points, depending on your commercial setup and coverage needs. If you also need flexible routing logic, Kiwi is strong. In practice, teams often combine one primary provider with a secondary source to validate anomalies and improve reliability.

Can I scrape Google Flights safely with ScrapingBee?
Scraping can be safe when you respect the target site’s terms, avoid aggressive rates, and build responsible retry/backoff logic. ScrapingBee helps by handling infrastructure like rendering and proxy rotation. You should still implement caching, rate limits, and monitoring so you’re not hammering pages unnecessarily.

How does ScrapingBee handle JavaScript-heavy flight pages?
We run a headless browser when you enable JavaScript rendering, so client-side apps can fully load before extraction. On top of that, our AI extraction can pull structured fields even if the HTML shifts, reducing how often you need to rewrite selectors.

What are the typical API costs for flight data?
Costs vary a lot. Partner platforms (like Skyscanner/Expedia) are usually contract-based, while Amadeus is usage-priced and even offers major discounts if you’re creating eligible bookings. For affiliates, Travelpayouts often monetizes via commission rather than per-call fees.