decolar-flights-scraper

A simple Node.JS module to scrape flights data from Decolar.com/Desapegar.com.

Installation

npm install decolar-flights-scraper

Usage

Available methods:

search: Retrives a list of flights for the given params.
getAirportCode: Retrives codes of airports and cities to be used in search method.

search

Retrieves a list of flights.

Required params :

type: Indicates if the flight is one-way or roundtrip. Possible values: roundtrip and one-way.
departureLocation: The three letter city or airport code. You can use the getAirportCode to find out.
arriveLocation: The same three letter city or airpot code, as used in de departureLocation param.
departureDate: The date you plan to leave the departure location. Should be in format: YYYY-MM-DD.
arriveDate: The date you plan to arrive in the departure location. Should be in format: YYYY-MM-DD. (This params is required unless the type is one-way).

Optional Params:

adultNumber: (defaults to 1). Sets the number of adults. Must be an integer.
fullDetail: (defaults to false). By default, only the most crucial fields will be returned. Pass it as true to get the complete documents. It can be a bit verbose.

Example:

const decolar = require('decolar-flights-scraper');

const opts = {
    type: 'roundtrip',
    departureLocation: 'sao',
    arriveLocation: 'nyc',
    departureDate: '2017-09-26',
    arriveDate: '2017-10-10'
};

decolar.search(opts)
    .then(console.log)
    .catch(console.log)

Results:

[ { totalPrice: 2735,
    currencyPriceCode: 'BRL',
    airlines: [ 'Copa Airlines' ] },
  { totalPrice: 2735,
    currencyPriceCode: 'BRL',
    airlines: [ 'Copa Airlines' ] },
  { totalPrice: 2752,
    currencyPriceCode: 'BRL',
    airlines: [ 'Avianca' ] },
  { totalPrice: 2920,
    currencyPriceCode: 'BRL',
    airlines: [ 'Avianca' ] },
    (...)
]

getAirportCode

Retrieves information about a city or airport searched. The result contain the three letter code to be used in the search method. Use it if you don't know the codes for your flight.

Options:

query: The partial or complete name of the city or airport which you want more information. It must contain at least 3 characters.
locale: (optional, by default is en_US). Set results language.

Examples:

const decolar = require('decolar-flights-scraper');

decolar.getAirportCode({ query: 'frankfurt '})
    .then(console.log);

Results:

{
  "unified": false,
  "data": {
    "AIRPORT": [
      {
        "object_id": "2313",
        "facet": "city",
        "description": "Frankfurt, Germany",
        "type": "CITY",
        "code": "FRA",
        "childs": [
          {
            "object_id": "193866",
            "facet": "airport",
            "description": "Frankfurt International  (rhein-main) Airport, Frankfurt, Germany",
            "type": "AIRPORT",
            "code": "FRA",
            "fuzzy_search_result": false,
            "latitude": 50.05072,
            "longitude": 8.56411
          },
          {
            "object_id": "193867",
            "facet": "airport",
            "description": "Neu Isenburg Airport, Frankfurt, Germany",
            "type": "AIRPORT",
            "code": "QGV",
            "fuzzy_search_result": false,
            "latitude": 50.05,
            "longitude": 8.683333
          },
          {
            "object_id": "193868",
            "facet": "airport",
            "description": "Frankfurt-Hahn Airport, Frankfurt, Germany",
            "type": "AIRPORT",
            "code": "HHN",
            "fuzzy_search_result": false,
            "latitude": 49.946815,
            "longitude": 7.27078
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "CITY": [
      {
        "object_id": "2313",
        "facet": "city",
        "description": "Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany",
        "type": "CITY",
        "code": "FRA",
        "fuzzy_search_result": false,
        "latitude": 50.11337,
        "longitude": 8.681362,
        "parent": {
          "object_id": "30453",
          "facet": "administrative_division",
          "type": "ADMINISTRATIVE_DIVISION"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Use the code data.AIRPORT[0].code or data.CITY[0].code in the search method for example.

More Info

This module hits directly the decolar.com/despegar.com APIs, thus be careful of the requests amount you send at once, because even having set properly headers to avoid being detected as a crawler, with a careless and exaggerated usage of this module can face a ** blocked ip ** problem for a short period of time. We suggest you to throttle the requests or even distribute them among different servers if you have enough hardware resources.
As the decolar.com/despegar.com API takes some seconds to respond ( you can note this behavior in their websites ), this module will take this seconds to retrieve the flights list as well.

Contributing

This module is quite recent, hence it has a tone of "TODOs" (some are explicit in the code) and things to be improved. If you have some suggestions or have found a bug, we will really appreciate if you open an issue or send a PR.