How to Choose a Flight API Provider: A Checklist for Travel Businesses

Choosing a flight API is one of the most important decisions a travel business makes, and one of the hardest to reverse. Every booking you make will have to be serviced through the same provider for months afterwards.

This checklist covers what to evaluate, in the order it tends to matter once you are live.

1. Content: Which Airlines, Through Which Channel

• GDS content gives broad coverage across airlines in one standard format.
• NDC content gives airline-specific offers, fares and extras, sometimes cheaper or richer than the GDS.
• Both is often the best answer, provided the API combines them so you do not integrate twice.

Ask for coverage for your routes and markets, not a global airline count. Ask which airlines you can actually ticket, not only search.

2. Pricing Accuracy

• Does the API reprice before booking?
• How are price changes reported to the customer?
• Are taxes, airline fees, seats and bags shown separately?
• Can you apply your own markups and fees per channel without exposing the supplier price?

Inaccurate prices cost money twice: once in the loss, and again in customer trust.

3. Booking Safety

• What happens on a timeout during booking? Is the outcome resolved by a person or guessed?
• Is a double confirm prevented?
• Is the payment captured only after the airline confirms?
• Are bookings that fail ticketing retried and alerted?

4. Servicing: The Most Underrated Question

For each of your top airlines, ask:

• Can tickets be voided within the window?
• Can bookings be cancelled and refunded, and how is the refund total calculated?
• Can date changes be made, and who pays the difference?
• How are airline schedule changes detected and handled?
• When automation is not available, is there a screen for your staff or only a support email?

Our comparison of flight API servicing across Airhux, Duffel and TPConnects shows how differently providers answer these questions.

5. Payments and Settlement

• Which payment methods can you offer customers?
• Do you settle with the provider by invoice, deposit or wallet?
• Can agents and customers pay from a wallet?
• How are refunds returned, and to whom?

6. Channels: B2C, B2B and Agents

• Can you run a consumer website and an agent portal on the same content?
• Can each agent have their own wallet, prices and permissions?
• Can agents service only their own bookings?
• Is each partner's data isolated from others?

If you plan to grow into B2B, choose for it now. Retrofitting agents onto a B2C-only API is painful.

7. Beyond Flights

Will you want car rental, transfers, tours, bus or visas later? A provider that already covers them saves a second integration.

8. Developer Experience

• Clear documentation and a realistic test environment.
• Consistent error messages that separate "refused" from "unknown".
• Idempotency for booking calls.
• Webhooks or events for changes.

Good documentation matters, but it is not a substitute for good servicing.

9. Commercials and Contracts

• Pricing model: per booking, per search, subscription or a mix.
• Search-to-book ratio limits and what happens when you exceed them.
• Minimum volumes and contract length.
• Who carries the risk on a failed ticket or a disputed refund.

10. Support

• Who do you call when a paid traveler has no ticket?
• What are the support hours and response times?
• Is there a named contact for your account?

A Simple Scoring Approach

Score each provider from 1 to 5 on each section above, and weight servicing and booking safety at least twice as heavily as search speed. Search can be improved later; a weak servicing model cannot be fixed without changing provider.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best flight API?

There is no single best one. The right provider depends on your markets, airlines, channels and how much servicing you want to build yourself.

Should a startup choose the provider with the easiest documentation?

Easy documentation speeds up launch, but servicing determines your costs after launch. Weigh both.

Can I use more than one flight API?

Yes, but every booking must be serviced where it was made, and your team will need to run two servicing processes.

How Airhux Can Help

The Airhux Travel API combines GDS and NDC content with booking safety, a full servicing desk, wallets and B2B channels. Start your project and we will answer every question on this checklist for your airlines.