We are looking for a cost effective way to make it easier for our users to provide accurate flight details for itineraries that they have already booked; their manual data entry is frequently inaccurate, which leads to downstream confusion.

We collect minimal info - carrier, flight number, and arrival and departure data (airport, date/time). Our volume is fairly low, on the order of a few hundred requests a month.

We see 2 options so far -

1. Parse the users' confirmation emails with an API such as AwardWallet or Amadeus trip parser API.

These have their limitations for us - AW is too expensive for our low volume, and (in the test environment) the Amadeus trip-parser is slow and often incomplete. I see reports on stack overflow that only a limited set of providers are covered in Amadeus.
This approach also seems inherently unstable and inefficient, given how varied providers' confirmation email formats are, and much other non-itinerary content they contain.

2. Retrieve the PNR data using the user's record locator, and parse it into our data structure.

This approach seems more straightforward and reliable, and there seem to be several PNR parsing APIs out there.
But it is not clear to me what the most appropriate options are for posting a record locator and last name, and retriving the PNR record.
Some of the bigger APIs will be too expensive for us, and our use case is very narrow - just a simple read-only retrieval.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about either of these approaches? Are there other approaches we should consider?

Thanks.

Techtalks: Traveltech

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