flightscanner

Topic

Web scraping/crawling flight information from SkyScanner API. (https://www.skyscanner.com/). Keeping track of flight price will help us choose best flights and save money without spending too much time on searching.

Main Function

Given departure, destination and a range of acceptable departure date,

  • scrape and filter flights by user-defined constraints such as price, duration, number of stops, etc.
  • search flight data automatically based on a schedule.
  • visualize flight information by shiny.

User constraints may include Price, Duration, Departure Time, Arrival Time, Stops, Layover, Airline, etc.

Installation

Important Notice: Now this package can only be installed on Unix/Linux/MacOS, since we use package cronR which can’t be installed on Windows. Sorry about the inconvenience.

You can install the released version of flightscanner with:

devtools::install_github("MinZhang95/flightscanner")

Example

To buy a ticket from Des Moines to Detroit for an adult on 2019-06-01 (today is 2019-05-09):

dsm2dtw_session <- apiCreateSession(origin = "DSM", destination = "DTW", startDate = "2019-06-01", adults = 1)

dsm2dtw_res <- apiPollSession(response = dsm2dtw_session, sortType = "price", sortOrder = "asc")

dsm2dtw_df <- dsm2dtw_res %>% flightGet()

To filter the available flights with a budget of $1,000, no more than 1 stop during the trip, and departure time not earlier than 8:00 am:

flightFilter(dsm2dtw_df, max_price = 1000, max_stops = 1, out_departure = c("08:00","24:00"))

You can also run the Shiny App,

shiny::runApp(system.file(package = "flightscanner", "shiny"))

For more details, see the vignette.