Expedia Group Rapid API vs Skyscanner Travel APIs

Expedia Group Rapid API

Expedia's lodging inventory with shop, price check, book, change and cancel in one API. Partner application and site review before production, no self-serve keys.

Skyscanner Travel APIs

Thirteen documented search APIs cover flights, hotels and car hire behind one x-api-key header, with default rate limits published per endpoint and no usage fee. Access needs an approved application, an audience above 100,000 monthly users and a commercial agreement, and the usage guidelines bar live-price calls made without a user action. Booking happens on supplier sites.

Expedia Group Rapid API

1. Build the SHA-512 signature from key, secret and the current epoch seconds in that order, per request
2. Send Customer-Ip and the session headers the docs ask for, since fraud checks use them
3. Point everything at test.ean.com until the site review is through; the paths match api.ean.com
4. Follow the links in each response rather than building URLs; price check and book links carry tokens
5. Read the Rate-Limit-Minute-Remaining and Rate-Limit-Day-Remaining headers, since the docs publish no ceilings

Skyscanner Travel APIs

1. Send the key in the x-api-key header on every call to https://partners.api.skyscanner.net. CORS is not supported, so call from a server
2. Create a live search only when a user has given origin, destination and exact dates. Use the indicative price endpoints for open-ended questions
3. Poll /search/poll/{sessionToken} until status is RESULT_STATUS_COMPLETE, and replace earlier results only when action is RESULT_ACTION_REPLACED
4. Start a new session when a poll returns 400. Flight session tokens last about an hour and hotel sessions at most 15 minutes
5. Pass each deepLink to the traveller unchanged, since altered encoding breaks Impact tracking, and never put personal data in subid2