Today, planning a trip and finding the best flight and hotel deals has become very easy, thanks to travel aggregators. These are web platforms or websites that gather all the relevant travel information like price and make them available on their platform.
Travel fare aggregation is the process of collecting information from airline companies and hotel websites. Online travel aggregators then use this information to provide guests with a smoother purchasing or reservation process. They help obtain a wide array of deals for customers to choose from, making the process of searching for flights and booking hotels online easy and hassle-free.
Now that you know what travel fare aggregators are, it is only normal to wonder how they collect data from the original airline or hotel sites. To ensure a fast and smooth data gathering process, travel fare aggregators use proxies.
What is a Proxy?
A proxy is a tool that acts as a medium between the internet and a particular entity. It diverts and converts traffic between protocols and networks, and it can even help bypass IP blocking and geo-restrictions. For instance, if you want to get information that is exclusively available in Australia, you will need a proxy Australia to bypass these restrictions. You can click here to learn more about proxy Australia and how it can help your business in harvesting data in geo-restricted locations.
When web scraping, travel aggregators use proxies to accomplish the task. So, if a travel aggregator is using proxies, traffic travels through the proxies into the specific address they requested — which is their website.
After that, the request flows back through the same proxy server they are using. The server then forwards the information received from the original airline or hotel site back to the aggregator. But aside from the basics, there’s still a lot to learn about the intricacies of this process.
How Do Travel Fare Aggregations Utilize Proxies?
Proxies allow fare aggregators to help their clients find the most practical and cheapest hotel rooms and airline tickets. Proxy servers are basically the point of contact between users and the website where they are trying to obtain travel information.
Proxies allow aggregators to mimic real internet users, and this makes it possible to collect unlimited amounts of travel data. By making the best out of proxy servers, travel fare aggregators can gather as much information as they could from various search engines.
Fare aggregators gather data from travel agencies, flights, hotel websites, and other sources. They browse for great deals across multitudes of booking websites to publish the most accurate results possible on their web page.
As a result, they can attain satisfactory user experience rates due to their easy-to-understand options, user-friendly displays, and, most of all, updated information. These tools help companies overcome obstacles that they may experience when obtaining overwhelming amounts of information from different websites.
Challenges That Travel Fare Aggregators Face
Flight and hotel websites often have stricter safety protocols to prevent the occurrence of automated online data gathering. In most cases, they block IP addresses that are operated and activated by a robot.
Due to this, some aggregators may face challenges when it comes to gathering online data from this vast industry. Here are some of them:
Complex Websites
Hotel and flight company websites are a real obstacle when it comes to web scraping because they often appoint delayed JavaScript rendering. They utilize this because JavaScript-based rendering allows web pages to become more dynamic. Moreover, they block suspicious internet protocol addresses and track incoming requests.
In these cases, travel fare aggregators are required to look for a flawlessly functioning and reliable solution that provides a faster and smoother data collection process. However, if the proxies used by travel fare aggregators can’t complement JavaScript-based rendering, companies can’t obtain the essential information.
Likewise, if flight and hotel websites always block internet protocol addresses, the information collection process will consume a lot more time than expected; thus, it becomes a more challenging task to accomplish.
Thankfully, by using proxies, travel fare aggregators can now render hidden contents in JavaScript components, offering a hundred percent success rate. With the server’s residential IP addresses, there will be significantly lesser IP blocks.
Restricted Geo-Locations
Flight and hotel websites offer various data that depend on geo-locations. Travel fare aggregators are required to access data from different locations to obtain accurate and relevant information. Accessing data that are only true and applicable to a particular geo-location is one of the obstacles travel fare aggregators face.
Aggregators need to gain access to more accurate and reliable information from across the globe. This way, they can provide the user with updated and accurate booking details. Usually, flight and hotel websites only display details based on the location of the user’s IP address.
But with the help of proxies, data pools from flight and hotel websites across the globe are already made more accessible to travel fare aggregators. Proxies also have city-level targeting. Proxy providers for aggregators ensure that companies can have hassle-free access to the necessary data regardless of their geo-location.
Outdated Information
Travel fare aggregators are required to track overwhelming amounts of flight and hotel websites to collect accurate, fresh, and updated information. Hence, there is a need for a system that can help them gather large data scales whenever required in real-time.
Flight and hotel websites display varying prices due to sales, discounts, seasons, and other factors. Their flexible price list makes it more difficult for aggregators to keep their website’s price list updated as well.
Thankfully, through proxies, updating websites is made easier and faster. For instance, aggregators can use a proxy Australia to obtain relevant and fresh information from the hotel and flight websites in Australia.
Conclusion
Undeniably, travel fare aggregators have simplified and eased the process of purchasing flight tickets and booking hotel rooms online. Users can already search and secure the greatest deals and lowest-possible rates for airline and hotel inclusions.
Expectedly, even the smoothest processes have their limitations. This is why proxy service providers aim to lessen these varying limitations to ensure better data management among travel fare aggregators. To get the most accurate data from relevant websites, make sure that you research the best proxy servers on the market.
