This is a quick script that I reversed engineered in order to poll ITA Matrix Airfare Search. It is still a bit rough around the edges as I try to clean it up. The goal is to determine a correlation between seat availability and price fare information to alert me on trends for flight segments. I want to build a cool dashboard in order to feed all this information to me automatically.

Right now I use ITA Matrix for airfare search & flightstats for seat availability. I'm looking to get information from nome other sites as well in order to get better data.

The ITA Matrix Airfare Search is a great tool so I suggest you go check it out here: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ Also checkout Flightstats (https://flightstats.com) its a great site for finding information about tracking. I use it to monitor whether flights are on-time or not.

#Installation# (build steps) Copy flight_scraper.cfg.example to flight_scraper.cfg python setup.py build python setup.py install

#Dependencies#

• Requests (http://docs.python-requests.org/)
• MongoDB (http://www.mongodb.org/)
• Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/)
• python-dateutil (http://labix.org/python-dateutil)
• Google Vizualizations API (https://code.google.com/p/google-visualization-python/)
• PhantomJS (http://phantomjs.org/)
• Selenium (http://docs.seleniumhq.org/)

#TO-DO#

• MapReduce Job to map seat availability to pricing information.

• Integrate with Prediction.io for Analysis.

• Seat map for availability - alert if aisle/window seat becomes available.

• Upgrade list - to track which flights give higher chance of upgrades.

• Add support for non-direct flights

• Calendar automated search support.

• Command Line Interface

• Backtest after enough data is gathered.

• Add more Search Engine Scrapers

• Add price forecasting from Kayak & Bing

• Output reminders kayak style:

  • http://www.kayak.com/images/sample-alerts.gif

• Stylize WebApp for reporting/Dashboard