When it comes to starting an online travel business, the easiest thing to do would be to start a travel aggregator website and generate income through affiliate sales or contextual advertising. To capitalize on this lucrative business opportunity, let’s take a look at how to create one.
What is a travel aggregator website?
A travel aggregator website is one that searches for deals on multiple websites and shows you the results in one place. For example, if you want to find a cheap flight from Dubai to New York City, check out American Airways or just go to an aggregator website and search hundreds of airlines at once to select the cheapest.
Best Examples of Travel Aggregator Websites
These are some of the top aggregator websites.
1. Skyscanner
Skyscanner always offers you the cheapest price on flights. An amazing feature of this website is that you can search flights for a whole month to find which date is the cheapest. You can also search from “my location” to “everywhere” to see where you can fly cheaply.
2. Adioso
Adioso is a simple search engine that has nifty features than Skyscanner. From your current location, you can search for flights to a warm place”, “a cheap city” or “a local festival”, depending on your mood.
3. Google Flights
Google Flights is easy to use and comes with great mapping features. It occasionally shows cheaper flights than Skyscanner or Adioso. So if you’re not happy with the deals, you can head over to Google Flights to see if it offers you a better price.
4. Expedia
Expedia is an online travel website that lets you book flights, vacation packages, hotels, cars, and cruises. An important feature of this website is the extensive coverage of all airlines and hotel chains.
How do travel aggregation websites like Expedia work and how do they make money?
Websites like Expedia collect and aggregate data from thousands of travel service providers. They then develop their own travel agency app and website for clients to compare travel options.
Most of these websites make more than 70% of their revenue from hotel reservations. To do this, they simply buy a large number of discounted hotel rooms and advertise it on their website.
For example, if Expedia wants to offer an all-inclusive 10-day vacation package to Thailand for two people for $1,700. First, you’ll contact a hotel in Thailand and buy 100 rooms for $50 instead of the actual price of $90.
Then Expedia will contact an airline and book 200 seats to Thailand for $600 (at a price With discount ). In addition, it will also provide food for the entire trip, which will cost around $250 for two people.
People who buy this package will be happy because they got a good deal for an all-inclusive package. Expedia is also happy because they actually paid $1,550 for the package and sold it for $1,700 to 100 couples.
Another source of revenue is commission.
For example, a hotel will offer 10 Rooms to Expedia for online booking. If the hotel offers $100 per room to Expedia and if a guest books the room, Expedia will pay $75 to the hotel and retain $25 as a commission.
How do travel aggregation websites like Expedia get their inventory?
Most companies obtain their inventory by dealing directly with hotels and global distribution systems (GDS) such as Amadeus, Galileo, Saber and Worldspan.
Note – GDS integration is only available to licensed travel agents who are accredited by ARC (Airlines Reporting Corporation) or BSP (Invoicing and Settlement Plan).
GDS’ history dates back to the 1960s, when a sophisticated method of keeping track of flight times, availability, and prices were needed.
However, some say that access to GDS can be expensive. Agencies use this as a last resort if they run out of inventory in a given city. If an agency directly buys rooms from a hotel, they can get 20-25% of the profits, while with GDS they can get as little as 15%.
Creating a travel aggregator website
To create a travel aggregator website, you need the following:
- CMS that can act as a framework for your website
- Nice front-end to match the aesthetic
- An engine to get data from APIs provided by other travel websites
In addition to these, you can also create the website from scratch or easily use available scripts. Let’s explore all possible options.
1. Build from Scratch
The robustness of a web application will be optimal if it is built from scratch. This method will give you more room to incorporate your ideas efficiently. The only downside to this method is that hiring a travel website development company to create a solution from scratch will definitely cost you time and money. However, if you value flexibility highly, you should take this route.
2.Build with WordPress
WordPress can be used to build any type of website. You can install plugins available from the WordPress directory or create a custom plugin to give your website additional capabilities. Compared to building a website from scratch, the cost and development time are comparatively less. So, in the case of WordPress, all you need to create a functional travel website is a ready-made theme or custom themes and plugins
3. Travel Engines
You can use web scripts or online booking engines to create a travel portal. These scripts will take care of all the key aspects of a travel website. Furthermore, these scripts also come with features like booking engine, billing and invoicing system, module based features and more to suit your requirements.
Some of the famous online booking engines are:
- OTHERMS
- PHPTravels
- Traviola
- TravelCarma
4. Adding Data
Once you’ve built your travel aggregator website, you need to connect it to data sources. It will guarantee access to travel data from hotels, airlines, etc. Some of the popular ways to add data are:
FREE API’s
Major travel search engines have affiliate programs where they give free access to their APIs. This will solve common challenges in one fell swoop: data aggregation and revenue generation. Some of the popular affiliate programs are:
- Skyscanner Affiliate Program
- Expedia Affiliate Network
- Kayak Affiliate Program
WEB REMOVAL SERVICES
Not all travel websites will provide an API. Other than that, the APIs you get may not have data fields that are necessary for your business. In such situations, you can get help from web crawling services that can connect to your database to convert unstructured data to structured data. Creating your own web tracking setup is not a viable solution, you can rely on service providers like ScrapeHero, Promptcloud, etc.
Start Creating a Travel Aggregator Website
In In recent years, as far as online business is concerned, travel is by far one of the most profitable niches. Millions of people are eager to explore the world due to the ease of booking international flights, buses, hotels, car rentals and more.
Creating a travel aggregator website is not that complicated. It depends on what features you plan to offer, whether you want to include original content, and many other factors. But with the basics in this blog, you can set up a website people will appreciate.
If you’re ready to get started or have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch. No matter a simple or complex project, our team will help you every step of the way.
More Resources
- Online Travel Agents: A Brief Introduction
- What are travel metasearch engines and how does it affect travel agencies?
- GDS, CRS, OTA, travel metasearch engines: what’s the difference?
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