🌍 Get me home 🛫

If you've ever planned a holiday where the start and end date are not fixed, you may have gone crazy trying to find the best flights from all combinations
Fret no more!
Using the SkyScanner API, you can get get all flights from a range of dates and collect them in a single spreadsheet.

📝 Table of Contents

• 📝 Table of Contents
• 🧐 About
• 🏁 Getting Started
  • Prerequisites
  • Installing dependencies
  • Sign up to RapidAPI and set up API Key
• 🎈 Usage
• 🎉 Acknowledgements

🧐 About

SkyScanner is a great resources, but checking many combinations is cumbersome. This tool automates querying the Skyscanner API and displays all the information condensed in a single spreadsheet.

🏁 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python >= 3.7
• R >= 4.0
• A RapidAPI account subscribed to the 3B Data SkyScanner API

Installing dependencies

For the python dependencies, run from the terminal:

pip install requests python-dotenv python-dateutil pyyaml

For the R ones, start an R session and run

install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("yaml")

Sign up to RapidAPI and set up API Key

• Go to the RapidAPI website
• Sign up by creating an account or using OAuth
• Head to the 3B Data SkyScanner API and subscribe (free tier is enough)
• Now go to the 'Endpoints' tab and copy the default value of the X-RapidAPI-Key
• Create a .env file and copy the following line changing the value of the RAPIDAPI_SKYSCANNER_KEY field to the value you just copied

RAPIDAPI_SKYSCANNER_KEY=<your_api_key>

🎈 Usage

Once you have all the packages and a API Key in your .env file, you need to edit params.yaml to specify the parameters of your search. The file provided has as an example a query I used to get home for Christmas.

First specify the locations:

• from: the IATA code of the airport you're leaving from
• to: the IATA code of the airport you're travelling to

Then the dates:

• The range of starting dates must be specified in the start_date_first and start_date_last fields, respectively
• For the return dates, the same applies, but the fields are end_date_first and end_date_last

Then run from the terminal

bash get_me_home.sh

The results will be stored in a CSV file in the out folder called flights_XX.csv (depending on how many files are there already).

Optional parameters:

• You can specify the location where JSON files are stored in the json_dir field

The script will check all combinations, query the Skycanner API to get all possible flights for that combination of flights and store the results in JSON files. An R script then parses all JSON files and exports the merged info in an Excel file sorted by price in ascending order.

🎉 Acknowledgements

• Standard README template from the Documentation Compendium