Overview
Introduction
The Car Hire Indicative Prices API returns a list pre-computed estimated price for rentals of different car categories in a given location on a given time.
The API takes a location for a given period of time and returns a list of quotes with indicative pricing information.
The API is meant to be used to provide accurate car hire indicative pricing information to enrich SEO pages or any other product that does not require highly accurate pricing data.
How we use it at Skyscanner
The Car Hire Indicative API currently powers our SEO inspirational content that give travelers an overview of quote prices by location or date. The prices shown are cached, therefore they may differ from live prices.
Endpoints
This API has 1 endpoint - /search.
/search
POST https://partners.api.skyscanner.net/apiservices/v1/carhire/indicative/search
/search endpoint takes a search query containing an origin, destination and date. It then
returns a list of indicative prices for the given query.
Concepts
Indicative prices
An indicative price is a daily quote price for a given location and date. These prices are not retrieved in real time (as opposed to live prices) and are instead cached values. Indicative prices values should be used as rough estimates of quote prices for a given destination and date.
Though not as accurate as live prices, indicative prices are much faster to retrieve and useful when performing complex queries, like comparing the prices for an entire month or for multiple locations. If exact prices or a bookable itineraries are needed, please use the live pricing API.
How indicative prices are generated
The API retrieves data from a file that is updated daily, reflecting the past seven days of car hire quote searches on Skyscanner. Each time a traveler searches for car hire on Skyscanner, all the quotes are recorded. A script then determines the lowest price each day to create the data file used by the API.
Request
/search
Required fields
Requests to the /search endpoint need to contain the following:
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
market | Market where search is coming from. E.g.: UK |
locale | Language to be used for the search. E.g.: en-GB |
currency | Currency that the search result prices are returned in. E.g.: GBP |
pickUpDropOffLocation | Pick-up and drop-off location. See car hire indicative prices API documentation for format |
Optional fields
Below are additional optional fields to modify the outcome of the request:
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
dateTimeGroupingType | Allows specification on how the response will be grouped. See the car hire indicative API reference for possible options |
Response /search
Fields
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
quotes | Indicative quotes for the criteria specified in the request. |
vendors | Contains information about the vendors referenced in quotes. Vendors are actual car companies that rent cars. Note that vendors can also be both an agent and a vendor at the same time. |