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How to Track Real-Time Flight Price Changes Using Web Scraping?

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Among the most dynamic sectors of the industry stands the airline industry. This is because the cost of airline tickets is constantly changing based on market demand. As a result, it becomes extremely challenging for travel agencies and even individual tourists to keep track of prices individually and find the best offer.

Manually tracking the shifts in ticket pricing in real-time can actually get very time-consuming and nearly impossible. And this is exactly where web scraping technology comes in. Generally, the web scraping technology automates the complete process of data collection. In this case, it involves collecting the real-time data around flight prices. This data collection may span across multiple websites of different airlines alongside various travel portals, right within seconds.

The best part is that, with the right setup in place, web scraping not only helps keep track of the changing flight prices but also helps you get an overview of the possible future trends!

Now, in this guide, we will be taking you through a deeper understanding of how to track real-time flight price changes alongside various aspects that help you leverage web scraping at its best!

What is Real-Time Flight Price Tracking?

Real-time flight price tracking generally means keeping an eye or monitoring the changing prices of flight tickets across different websites. With the help of real-time flight price tracking, you get the detailed pricing information from multiple sources across the internet, which in turn helps in decision-making for all your travel plans.

Moreover, this kind of price tracking also helps you compare different prices (all at once) and find the best deals based on the insights.

Why Use Web Scraping for Flight Price Monitoring?

The prices of flights keep fluctuating minute by minute. This makes it very difficult to track which prices may suit you the best. In such cases, web scraping for flight price monitoring is often the best option. The web scraping technology easily automates the entire data tracking process and helps you get all the details in real-time.

For instance, consider flight price tracking. Here, the most interesting part is that the scraper automatically scrapes flight prices in real-time from different websites and presents them to you. This smart automation not only saves your time but also provides faster data insights at its best!

How to Track Real-Time Flight Price Changes Using Web Scraping

Web scraping solutions don’t follow fixed steps for all requirements. Instead, each step in web scraping is personalized to make the best use of the automation. Below are the steps that take you through a detailed understanding of how to track flight price changes with the help of web scraping:

Identify Data Sources

The most important step in setting up the foundation for tracking flight price changes with the help of a web scraper is to simply identify data sources. Now, data sources include but are not limited to different website links of airlines, travel agencies, or even booking portals. These sources quickly help the scraper find a path for extracting the most personalised data that you are looking for. Now, data sources don’t just provide a path to the scraper. In fact, these sources even help in providing key details such as the exact flight times, prices of the tickets, and even flight availability with the utmost accuracy!

Build or Align a Scraper

Building or aligning a personalised scraping solution is the next step in setting up the foundation for tracking flight price changes with the help of a web scraper. Popular frameworks like BeautifulSoup and Scrapy, among other available options, can be used to get started with the setup of the scraper. Now, these frameworks are generally very popular for extracting large volumes of accurate data from different websites. Keep in mind the key data fields the scraper should capture, which include, and are not limited to, the country of origin and destination, time of departure, ticket prices, and so on. Setting up a data scraper to track flight time changes may be quite a task for businesses because of the multi-step processes involved. In such cases, outsourcing a professional Airline web scraping from experts like Scraping Intelligence is recommended. As experts in the industry, we not only ensure faster deployment of the scraper with accuracy but also handle all anti-bot measures.

Set a Scraping Frequency

Another important step in setting up the foundation for tracking flight price changes with the help of a web scraper is to set up an accurate scraping frequency. It is indeed a fact that flight prices keep fluctuating and are dynamic. These prices can keep changing minute by minute and several times an hour. Hence, setting up a scraper that ideally runs at different frequencies becomes an important part of running the scraper itself. For example, setting up the scraper at a frequency of every 15-30 minutes to track flight price changes is ideal.

Implement Data Cleaning and Storage

Once you have set up the scraping frequency and have added the required data fields (here, for instance, flight prices, etc.), you can set the scraper to action. Now post the scraper has collected all the raw data, the scraper will then implement data cleaning for you. Data cleaning basically means removing all of the duplicate data, filling in the missing values, or even aligning a set format to make it readable. Post this, the final data can be stored in various formats, which include but are not limited to databases like MySQL or even Excel and CSV for real-time access.

Use Dashboards for Real-Time Insights

Data scraping does not just stop at capturing information from different websites and bringing it into order. In fact, once the data has been completely cleaned, processed, and stored, it should be further aligned through smart dashboards for actionable insights. Now, by this, we mean that you can integrate all of the processed data into custom dashboards or BI tools. Custom dashboards and BI tools play a key role in web data scraping. This is because they not only help monitor current trends with ease but also help users respond to flight price changes quickly.

Key Benefits

There are several benefits that come along with tracking real-time flight price changes with the help of a web scraper. Some of them include:

Real-time Flight Price Changes Tracking: Use Cases

Real-time flight price tracking isn’t just about collecting data; it’s about putting that data to work. Here are five key use cases demonstrating the practical applications of this technology.

Dynamic Pricing Strategy

The first use case that comes into consideration is the dynamic pricing strategy that real-time tracking of flight price changes offers. This is because it offers an advantage to businesses to track the changes in competitor prices and adjust their own fares.

Market Research and Analysis

Next is market research and analysis. Here, businesses can use the data that has been captured by the scraper to further study the trends, research what the market is currently running on, and analyze all of it for drafting better strategies.

Providing Personalized Offers and Deals

Real-time data helps businesses get the most accurate information for the seamless running of their businesses. When they can track real-time data, businesses can then create personalised discounts and other offers for specific routes, which in turn will help in attracting more and more customers!

Competitor Benchmarking

In any and every business industry, understanding and monitoring competitors is of the utmost importance. In this case, too, web scraping for real-time flight price changes can actually transform and help better business operations.

Conclusion

Tracking flight price changes is not optional anymore. It has evolved into a pure necessity for businesses in the airline industry. You can always be assured knowing that web scraping isn’t just another simple technology. It is an advanced automation solution that not only provides scalability but also speed and accuracy. And by this, we mean that, compared to manual data scraping, automated web scraping of real-time flight price changes saves you a lot of time. This is because it eliminates the need for human intervention, subsequently eliminating the possibility of human errors. Plus, since the process is completely automated, it also helps extract a large volume of data in less time, saving operational costs and time.

Now, collecting data through web scraping is not just about automatically getting your hands on large volumes of data. It is also equally important to make sure to comply with the website’s terms and conditions strictly to stay within the regulations.

Here, at Scraping Intelligence, we strictly scrape only publicly available data and stay within the legal and ethical compliances set by the law throughout our web scraping services. As experts in the industry, we deliver the most reliable and fully customized flight price tracking data solutions that meet the best of your needs. With extensive industry experience, we have the expertise needed to help you with complete web scraping solutions, right from setting up the tools to handling every step of the process!

Contact us today to schedule a consultation and learn more about our expert services in detail!

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