Where do travel search sites get their data?

[d000hg]

There are several sites which seem to have access to the same data about train time-tables, availability and pricing. Similarly with other sites for flights and so on.

Are there central DBs or web-services they buy access to? It seems there must be, but considering many travel search engines like Expedia can see flights, it must be some established feed rather than a secret database?

Anyone know what really goes on with these things?

[TykeMerc]

Yes they subscribe to feeds from the airlines and their booking and pricing systems and make an income from commissions on linked flight sales.

All comparison type websites work on this sort of basis and it's modelled around the Reuters market datafeed methodology which is quite elegant and has been around for more than a few years.

[Spacecadet]

http://tourismencyclopedia.pbwiki.com/GDS+History

took 30 seconds in google

[Xenophon]

Galileo and Amadeus are two I have heard of, but a few years back now.

[Xenophon]

http://tourismencyclopedia.pbwiki.com/GDS+History

took 30 seconds in google

..and there are the rest!

[d000hg]

http://tourismencyclopedia.pbwiki.com/GDS+History

took 30 seconds in google

What search string?

[Spacecadet]

What search string?

can't remember... searched for airline XML feeds first, that then lead on to the GDS system which I googled for to get that page

[d000hg]

I'm especially interested in UK train data. I found this site: http://www.atoc.org/ but I'm really interested how sites know the availability of different fares.

[MPwannadecentincome]

Its not just GDSs - which can also show train timetables and fares provided you are an authorised travel "agent". Some travel vendors (airlines, train companies, etc) allow external access to their systems directly, in fact this type of thing has been going on for years - before the internet it was private viewdata systems. Messaging standards exist for these things, the older ones are EDIFACT based and there are OTA/XML based standards too but you will find some website simply "screen scrape" another system to pull off the data they need.