Online Flight Schedule
Industry
Business Idea Overview
Again, since I'm an Indian Resident, I'm basing this idea off my online experience in India. I have searched the net for solutions similar to his but found none.
The idea is to design an online website which provides flight schedules for a specific week for all airlines operating in the country.
All travel and ticketing websites provide you with schedules of flights for the date range you provide or the travel date that you provide but NONE of these sites provide you with a list of airlines travelling TO and FROM the destinations that you want for the week of travel. The biggest information that is missing is the flight schedule. For example, if I wanted to know which airlines travel from A to B directly and on which days of the week, there is no site which gives me this information. Some of the sites like (MapsOfIndia) provides such information for some destinations but the information is outdated at times.
What makes the idea profitable, distinct or superior
1. This would definitely attract the airlines as a sponsor as it would mean publicity and dissemination of information for them with no maintenance or operational costs.
2. This would be a one-stop shop for schedules of different airlines
3. If marketed properly, this would have a large number of hits and Adsense adverts could generate sizeable income for this website.
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RE: Nice thought
Hi,
Thanks for your valuable comments. I always appreciate constructive and actionable feedback.
I agree GDS would be an expensive affair. However, I was browsing through the airline sites and every airline website has a schedules page which offers a download of their latest schedule in XLS or PDF format. So, this can be done in 3 tiers: First tier pulls the excel files to a location with the help of a web service. Second tier does the ETL using C#/Java code or the in-built ETL tools with RDBMS environment (like SSIS in SQL Server) and then puts it into the database. And the third tier would the application interfacing with the database to be exposed to the website users.
will be a useful site
this will be a useful website, especially for frequent flyers. they can check all available flights for all the airlines and maybe even compare prices or promotion if any.
and extracting the flights details from the xls/pdf files are not that difficult but is it legal to do so? this is the question...
RE: will be a useful site
Thanks for your comments.
That is something for the LCA team to decide. My initial research indicates that it shouldn't be a problem but I'm no legal expert.
Nice thought
Hi Amit,
Cool idea...
but u need to evaluate how the required data (flight info) can be retrieved from.
As far as I understand, u need connectivity to a GDS to get this sort of data...which is very very expensive.
I'm just being critical and am trying to evaluate ur idea. Do let me know ur inputs on where you intend to pull out flight info from?
Regards,
Cool M