Skip to main content

Frequently Asked Questions

Flights API General​


I'm getting a rate limit error while calling the API. What could be the reason?

Most integrations come with a default rate limit sufficient to build a full integration. They can be found here. If you are getting rate limited, please contact your account managers with examples of instances where you’re encountering rate limits, and we can work with you to further optimise your integration.

Does Skyscanner's API Support CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing)?

For security reasons, we do not support CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing).

Can I use Skyscanner's Flights API without providing booking deeplinks in my solution?

Unfortunately, we can only offer you our API if the searches result in end user bookings. We only have permission to distribute our supply partners (airline and online travel agents) pricing data for the purpose of generating bookings for them. If you require the prices only, please get in touch with our

Data Products team

. Alternatively, we would suggest using a GDS (Global Distribution System) instead.

Where can I find a list of IATA codes for all of the available airlines?

You can access the list of airlines via our carriers service. Alternatively, you can find the list of all IATA & ICAO airlines codes on the official IATA website:

Can I get a list of carriers/online travel agents via the API?

Yes, the API does support retrieving a list of carriers. You can find more information in the carriers API documentation.

Can we be provided with all of the airline logos?

We don't provide a catalog of company airlines logos. If you are using Flights Live Prices, each response will contain the logos for the airlines present in the results.

Can I get a code sample?

We currently do not provide specific code samples, we offer comprehensive API documentation to help you get started. You can find detailed information about how to use our APIs, including parameters, responses, and usage examples. If you have any specific questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out your account manager.

Flights Live Prices​


For flights, I see cases when the price shown in the booking link does not match the price on the booking agent/online travel agent landing page.

Prices are provided by our booking agent/online travel agent partners and are subject to change without notice. We know how important it is for our partners and travellers to see accurate prices, and are always striving to improve price accuracy. If you notice any inaccurate prices on your end, we’d ask for you to raise it with your account manager.

We’d require you to provide as much information as possible:

  • Logs, video recording or screenshots of the inaccurate prices you are seeing

  • Time and Date the Price Inaccuracy was identified
  • Market that search was performed in

  • Any other contextual information including the request you are sending to our API

This will allow our internal teams to investigate into the issues you’ve identified.

For flights, I see cases where certain booking agents/online travel agents do not appear in search results.

Itineraries are provided by our booking agent/online travel agent partners and are subject to change/removal without notice. The real-time nature of the Flights Live Prices API means itineraries are unlikely to remain consistent for long periods of time. If you notice consistent issues with our booking agents/online travel agents, please contact your account manager who can pass this on to the relevant team to resolve.

I'm using the Flights Live Prices API and not seeing timezone offsets displayed anywhere. What is the best practice to display flight times and flight duration property?

All dates and times returned by the Flights Live Prices API are local to the airport. This is a standard practice in the industry and avoids issues related to time zones. We strongly recommend that you avoid calculating durations yourself.

How do I know when to stop polling the pricing session?

You should stop polling when the Status in the response returns 'RESULT_STATUS_COMPLETE'.

Can I search for one specific flight?

Unfortunately, we are not able to provide searches for just one specific flight.

Can I change the search details within a single pricing session?

No, if you need to change your search criteria, you'll need to create a new session.

I see cases where the response contains some unpriced itineraries, is this expected?

Yes, unpriced itineraries can be returned by the API. By default, we try not to send those via our API but sometimes you might observe those to some less popular itineraries or due to some error coming from our data supply partners. Still, most of the time following the deeplink will give you the price of the itinerary. Still if you feel that what you are seeing is wrong or misleading please contact your account manager who can pass the issue onto the relevant team.

Flights Indicative Prices​


Why does the Indicative Prices API not match that of the live pricing?

Our Indicative Prices Service captures all live pricing searches made by every user on the Skyscanner website or from a supply partner. This service allows us to bypass the demanding nature of flight searches to enable early intent use cases where you need the results instantly, such as quickly assessing how much budget would be needed to go to a City or Country or how much cheaper is it to fly to a destination on one day rather than another.


While the Indicative Pricing Service gives a good indication of the price due to the dynamic nature of flight pricing even recently stored prices can be inaccurate.


The Indicative Pricing Service tries to ensure prices are readily available for each route and date that travellers want to book or compare and will store prices for up to a few days if we think they are still accurate and useful to travellers. For some unpopular routes and dates, there can be circumstances where we might not have results as a traveller search has not been generated or we have removed a price as Skyscanner does not believe it is accurate.

Car Hire Live & Indicative Prices​


Why can't I search for car hire indicative prices with different pickup and dropoff locations?

Indicative prices are derived from aggregated historical data based on thousands of daily rental searches. The vast majority of these involve the same pickup and drop-off location. As a result, we do not support one-way rentals in the indicative pricing API, as this would lead to inaccurate estimates and risk undermining user trust. Indicative pricing is best suited for approximate pricing use cases such as:

  • SEO content
  • Price benchmarking and trend analysis
  • Market intelligence tools
  • Pre-sales estimates in chatbots or support tools
  • Product listings and comparison tables

For accurate, real-time pricing — especially for one-way rentals — use the Live Pricing API.

Can I group car hire results by pickup location or limit the data returned for a specific pickup location?

The Live Pricing API does not support server-side grouping or filtering by pickup location, as our B2B partners have diverse data needs. Hence, a one-size-fits-all response structure would not effectively accommodate all use cases.

Suppose you're looking for summarised or aggregated data by location. In that case, we recommend using the Indicative Pricing API, which is designed to support high-level insights and trends at a lower cost.

The Live Prices API seems to be missing detailed car information, such as seats and luggage capacity, which are visible on the Skyscanner site. Can I retrieve this data via the API?

Detailed car specifications, such as doors, car type, transmission, fuel type, and air conditioning, are not returned directly in the API response. Instead, this information is encoded in the SIPP code, which is included in all Live Pricing API responses.

Seats and luggage capacity are currently present in our Indicative Prices API, and Skyscanner is planning on including this information in the Live Prices API in a future release. Other detailed car specifications, such as number of doors, car type, transmission, fuel type, and air conditioning are not returned directly in the API response. Instead, this information is encoded in the SIPP Code, which is included in all Live Pricing API responses.

The SIPP code is a four-character standard defined by ACRISS (Association of Car Rental Industry System Standards), enabling consistent vehicle classification across car rental providers. Partners can extract the most up-to-date vehicle attributes by interpreting the SIPP code using the latest ACRISS standards. We intentionally do not translate or interpret the SIPP codes in our response to ensure that partners always receive the raw data and can apply the most current decoding logic according to their needs.


info

Didn't find what you were looking for? Visit our Partnership FAQs for more information, or submit a request for personalised technical support here.