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Usage Guidelines

Skyscanner's market leading suite of flight search APIs provide globalised content and localised coverage to over 250 partners around the world. By using our API, you agree to adhere to our UX, design and usage guidelines as outlined below and which form the Technical Requirements. Failure to comply with these requirements could result in your API access being revoked.

Essential​

Arrival Times and Durations​

Many flights arrive on a different day from when they take off. This is a potential source of confusion for customers, so when displaying the times for flights it's important to also include indicators of the dates. For example, a flight may go over midnight, it may cross different timezones and it may cross the international date line. The most common way of handling this is a "+1", "+2", "+3" or "-1" (which can happen if the flight crosses the date line) indicator to indicate that the arrival occurs on a different day to the departure.

Skyscanner search example with different date of arrival

  • Always indicate if the flight arrives on a different day from departure
  • Always handle the cases of +1, +2, +3 and -1 days

You must display the text "Powered by", followed by the Skyscanner logo, as shown. The whole element must link to (www.skyscanner.net) You can choose exactly how and where to display this, but is should be obvoious to end-users when Skyscanner data has been used.

Do no distort the image size when you scale it. Make sure logo spacing is included as provided.

Skyscanner logo

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(Note: do not distort the logo in any way)

Look to Book​

Live Pricing Service calls can be costly for Skyscanner and our airline/OTA partners to service. Skyscanner typically absorbs the cost of Live Pricing calls so long as those calls result in a reasonable amount of end-user deeplink clicks. We would expect between 5% and 20% of all user-generated live pricing create sessions to result in an end-user booking deeplink to airlines/OTAs, depending on the type of product you are building and the market(s) you drive traffic in. To achieve that rate, it is important that there is clear intent from the user in a particular query (including exact dates) before a Live Pricing session is created.

Skyscanner search by specific date

This query contains all the main parameters to perform a Live Pricing Service Call. Origin, destination, and dates are known.

Skyscanner search by whole month

This example doesn’t have exact dates. Possible options are to show indicative pricing using the Browse Cache Service, or to prompt the user to add dates.

  • Live Pricing Service calls are only made on user-generated requests. Automated requests (calls without user action) to the Live Pricing Service do not occur
  • Live Pricing Service calls are only made when all elements of the search (exact O&D pair, dates of travel) are known
  • The partner users Browse Cache Service when one or more of these parameters is unknown or not specified by the user

Click Quality​

Skyscanner tracks revenue based on the value of each end-user deeplink that occurs through your affiliate product. Each deeplink to a particular airline/OTA has an estimated CPC value assigned to it, based on the airline/OTAs commercial terms with Skyscanner and their click to sale conversion rate. In order to base revenue tracking on Skyscanner commercial terms and rates, we require each end-user deeplink through your product to be of the same quality as a Skyscanner end-user deeplink. This is mainly achieved by ensuring that users are as informed about their chosen itinerary before deeplinking as they would be on Skyscanner.

  • The user should be reasonably informed of the following information before a deeplink can be made:
    • Origin and destination of all legs/flights of the itinerary
    • Dates of travel for all legs/flights
    • Local times of departure for all legs/flights
    • Visible indication if flight is Direct or Indirect
    • Number of Stopovers if flight is Indirect
    • Stopover airports with time of departures
    • Carrier for all legs/flights
    • Booking agent
    • Price comparison across multiple itineraries
  • The user can deeplink to a Skyscanner partner by clicking on a visible button on the flight result or on Booking Agent / Price link. These are the only clickable parts of the itinerary box which result in a deeplink to an airline/OTA partner
  • The main carrier for each leg is listed on the flight result without the need to click or reveal anything
  • Users are not able to deeplink to an airline/OTA directly from a banner, newsletter or other promotional material
  • Booking agent loads in a new tab and that tab is unobscured by any other window when the user deeplinks
  • There is a clear unobscured link which allows users to get full details of the flights
  • Users can understand what the airport code means without having to open full details. This can be a hover/click on the code, or written out in full in the itinerary box.

Desirable​

Text Colour​

Below are some non-essential best practices which you should consider including in the design of your product: Skyscanner search flights red color to indicate stops Skyscanner uses text colour (red for indirect, green for direct) as well as a visual indicator to denote stops.