Air Shopping Overview

Air shopping allows you to search for flight options by lowest fare or availability.

• An Air Availability Search returns scheduled flights between a given city pair on a given day, and indicates whether seats are available on those flights. The Air Availability Search returns availability, but not does not include any pricing information. To obtain pricing, a follow-up Air Pricing transaction must be made.
• Low Fare Shopping functionality combines air availability and a fare quote request to return the lowest available fares for a specified itinerary, using origin/destination and date information. Additional modifiers can be added to the Low Fare Shopping request, including: time period, included or excluded carriers, private fare modifiers, and passenger types. Fares are available for one-way, round-trip, and multi-city travel.

Universal API offers two options for performing Low Fare Shopping:

• A synchronous call using LowFareSearchReq. In the synchronous call, the response data from all applicable providers is returned in a single response.
• An asynchronous call using LowFareSearchAsynchReq. In the asynchronous call, responses from providers and suppliers are returned as they become available.

Note: Customers can improve their bookability by following Travelport’s recommended Air Workflow best practices. These best practices provide a workflow that will assist you in realizing more successful bookings and fewer sell failures. For example, one Travelport customer went from an average sell failure rate of 13.43% in January to a sell failure rate of 0.55% in February, simply by modifying their API workflow.