What Is An API? How To Create an App for Live Flight Data?

In this article, you will learn about what an API is, its usefulness for flight-tracking websites and applications, and how can you build an app for live flight data. Let’s start understanding the API.

What Is An API?

An API Software is a web-based tool that allows data sharing across multiple software programs. This helps multiple businesses to easily merge and communicate better across different platforms and functions so that overall productivity can be increased. 

How Can An API Be Useful For Building A Flight Tracking App For Live Flight Data?

A Flight data API helps tourists or travel agencies to get essential information on current flight status like departure, arrival, and delay time, aircraft type, and much more. So, if you are curious about how the ultimate flight app can be useful for your business and how to create an app for live flight data, you have landed on the right page. Let us unveil the key pointers related to the flight tracking application to make you more familiar with the concept and use it to make your business process more efficient. 

1. Flight Tracking Software

It is crucial to build a flight-tracking application to ease the process of flight tracking.

2. Provides Crucial Information

It’s a piece of software solution that collects, processes, and filters out the most relevant results based on a query from numerous sources. The real-time flight data provided by APIs helps to make a flight-tracking app successful by providing customers with actual flight statistics. It contains metadata about a flight path like its origin, destinations, and arrival and departure timings. This makes the flight tracking application user-friendly.

3. Ease The Process of Data Collection

The information provided by a Flight Tracking API is scraped from various sources across the internet and provides you with the most optimum results at the top of your fingers. This makes the process of data collection much easier in comparison to the former time-consuming manual process. This helps any business or customer to save up on their efficient time and makes traveling super easy. For any flight tracker app to be successful, data collection is very important which can be easily done with the help of a flight API.

4. Real-time Tracking

With continuous real-time tracking of flights, users can now easily keep a hawk’s eye on their flight status without any fuss. Traveling now becomes effortless and super fun when you have live flight data in the palm of your hand. Users need continuous updates on their flights to eliminate any risk of last-minute hassle. This could be clearly achieved by using a real-time flight status API in your flight tracking application.

5. Easy Integration

Flight APIs directly allow travel agents to integrate all flight-related content from multiple sources to provide their customers with the best results. It connects agents with leading airlines and helps you provide a seamless and unique customer experience to their guests. Get an edge over your competitors by including such innovative technology in your application.

Features of Flight Tracker Apps

For a Flight Tracker App to be efficient and practical for customers, the following features must be analyzed and included.

1. Access to Global Market

A global flight tracker must have a feature for tracking domestic and international flight searches to provide users with optimum results. This opens up the possibility to capture a large share of the market and make your application more convenient for the users.

2. User-Friendly

Another feature that is quite essential for any application to be successful is that it should be user-friendly. So, if you are planning either to build a flight tracking application or to purchase one for yourself, ensure that it is easy to use. Do not go for any application that is complicated in nature and hard to understand on the user’s end. People only like and use those tools and software that are handy and don’t involve any hassle.

3. Easy Booking and Cancellation Process

Whether you’re building flight tracking or flight booking app development. Customers are looking for simple and great services from any service provider. So, to keep your users engaged with your flight tracker app, you must provide them with an easy booking and cancellation process. Any customer using the application will first see if they can directly book and cancel the flight from the application. Tracking and flight schedule API will provide your application with a feature that will definitely help you leverage your business and is quite essential to make the software useful.

4. Competitive Pricing

Every customer is sensitive towards pricing and wants to pay the minimum for the services opted for. So, to make your application more convenient for your users the pricing provided by you must be competitive according to the industry standards. A flight pricing API helps you to provide discounts and special deal offers at the time of booking a flight can improve customer engagement and overall boost profitability.

5. Secure Payment Gateways

Another feature that is a must-have in your flight tracker application is secure payment gateways. Customers will use the application only when they are comfortable with the payment options and are confident in them. You can use trusted platforms like Google Pay to make the application more convenient and trustworthy.

Steps to Build a Flight Tracking Application:

If you are interested in software development of your own to build a flight-tracking application, you can use the following pointers as your base.  

1. Market Research

Before building your application the first and foremost step starts with a thorough research of competitors and the external market. Research your competitors to get a list of every useful function that is essential for the application. This will help you analyze and study both the drawbacks and the perks of your market and accordingly help you frame a better strategy and plan for your application. Turn their weaknesses into your opportunity and cover the backlinks to get an edge over your competitors. Also, read customer reviews to get a better understanding of customers’ expectations.

2. Defining Application Features

Now that you have a thorough knowledge of your market, it will be much easier for you to list out the application features. Create and define your project requirements which include detailed information on technological, non-functional, and functional requirements.

3. Create A Prototype

Once you are done defining your requirements, the next step is to create a prototype for the application. This will help you visualize your application by providing it with a shape or basic outline. It provides an intuitive experience of your software that helps you decide better and give a proper outlook on your product.

4. Hire Application Developers

Once the prototype is created and given a yes, the next stage comes down to the actual development of the product. At this stage, you might need to hire developers to build the application on the basis of the platform you choose. This is a crucial step as it will overall affect the quality and working of the application and thus any risk must be eliminated.

5. Make It Budget Friendly

The most crucial aspect of developing flight tracking applications for startups is budget or cost. It required a lot of planning, analysis, a professional development team, and timing. Therefore, it may cost you between $35,000 and $50,000 to construct the front-end, back-end, UI/UX components, and other app pieces. The price can increase to $100,000 if you want to include certain additional features. The total cost of developing a flight-tracking app depends on many things. Therefore, it’s crucial to check out the cost of additional features you want to add to the flight application in order to create the app in the respective budget.

6. Test and Monitor  

Once all the coding and designing are done, it is important to test and check for any potential bugs before launching the application. This step also provides you the time to add or make the necessary changes to improve its efficiency. Also, check that it is compatible with the app store’s security and design guidelines. Once everything is good to go, you can launch the application and keep monitoring it for further improvements.

How Can You Monetize Your Flight Tracker Application?

Monetization in any application development is crucial to earning profits. But how to monetize your flight tracker application has numerous possible ways. You can make the application fee to attract customers yet generate revenue in the following ways.

1. Provide Special Plans for Premium Services

You can introduce monthly plans for your customers which provide premium services like ads removal, personalized alerts, 365 days of flight history, and much more. Put a charge on such subscription plans and you can monetize your business as well as earn loyal customers for your application.

2. Generating Revenue Through Advertisements

Another method to monetize your business is through advertisements. You can tie up with multiple brands or businesses to showcase their advertisements on your application to your users and simultaneously charge them for the same. In this manner, advertisements are a great source of earning from both ends. You can charge your customers for an ad-free experience and also businesses to display advertisements.

Conclusion

So, that was all about flight API and flight tracking applications. We hope this article provides you with a deep understanding of how to build the flight tracker application, its features, and everything you want to know. Use the Flight API today to start up with smart technology and change the traveling experience forever.