FlightStats offers a variety of data and information services to the travel and transportation industry. Customers include travel agencies, TMCs, airlines, airports, publishers, aviation consultants, airfreight forwarders, government organizations, and more. A brief description of our business solutions can be found below. For additional information, please visit our Developer Center.

• Itinerary Monitoring and Messaging
• Flight Segment Monitoring and Messaging
• Historical Flight Information
• FIDS Solutions
• API Services
• Syndicated Content

Our key B2B offering, itinerary monitoring and messaging, involves capturing the entire itinerary of a passenger, monitoring the itinerary for travel-related events, and sending relevant travel messages. We offer the following itinerary monitoring services:

• Attendant - FlightStats Attendant enables users to monitor the activity of itineraries of interest. Attendant consolidates all activity into a single console view, enabling the quick identification of trips either proceeding as scheduled or incurring trouble. Attendant functionality is available as a hosted application, or can be integrated via Web Services.
• Messaging - The FlightStats Messaging Service delivers proactive flight alerts to travelers. Messages are delivered based upon agency-configured rules that designate the scheduled and/or triggered events the agencies would like pushed to customers. Messages are branded with the agency's look-and-feel, and hosted content management tools allow agencies to change certain graphical and copy elements on demand. Messages are available in XML, e-mail, and text formats.
• At-Risk Monitoring - The FlightStats At-Risk Monitoring Service monitors a set of itineraries, and returns information on those itineraries that have cancellations, delays, diversions, threatened and/or missed connections. Information about identified threats for this subset of itineraries is pushed to a designated location via XML. At-Risk Monitoring is included with Attendant or can be purchased separately.

The key to providing an itinerary monitoring and messaging solution is to gain access to the passenger's itinerary and to be able to update the itinerary with any changes that occur prior to the day of travel (e.g. schedule changes and any flight changes that occur due to the passenger changing the itinerary). There are several sources of itineraries, many of which we can access via partnerships we've formed with GDSs, back office systems and other sources.

Another important capability necessary for providing a high-adoption flight alert system is what is known as an Opt-in Passenger Profile. This, combined with an Agency Profile, enables an agency to decide what types of messages a customer can select and provides the simple means for the customer to opt-in and save communication preferences (e.g. email address, mobile phone number, format of messages by type of message, etc.).

Itinerary monitoring and messaging services are priced on a per itinerary basis.

Additional information is available at the Developer Center in the Flight Messaging Section.

Flight segment monitoring and messaging is a very useful way to track individual flights of interest. With flight segment monitoring, a customer uses our Web Services API to create a tracking rule for a flight. The rule consists of:

• Flight information (carrier, flight number, origin airport, destination airport and date)
• Types of events to monitor (canceled, diverted, delayed by more than x minutes, departed, landed, etc.)
• Delivery format information and destination (email, long text, short text or XML)

When an event occurs that matches the rule, a message is sent according to the delivery information.

Flight segment monitoring is priced on a per-segment monitored basis. Pricing includes text, email or XML delivery.

Additional information can be found at the Developer Center, in the Flight Segment Messaging Section.

The FlightStats data platform tracks approximately 100,000 flights a day in real-time. All of the data, including each update by every data source along with related information (weather & airport delays), is archived, resulting in a vast database of historic flight information. From this archive, a number of products and data services are created.

FlightStats Analytics
FlightStats Analytics is a powerful online reporting engine that accesses a database of historical flight information dating back to 2004, and presents the data in a manner optimized for online delivery and data export. Each night the data from 3 days prior is extracted from the archive, translated into structures more appropriate for reporting, and loaded into the Analytics database. From this, reports can be run on carriers, airports, routes, cancellations and diversions, runway times, degree of lateness, impact of changing flight numbers and more.

FlightStats Analytics also offers what is referred to as Operational Reports. These reports extract information within the 3 day window described above thereby providing near real-time delay and cancellation information on carriers, routes and airports.

FlightStats Analytics is a vast improvement over data made available through the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS):

• Coverage for all carriers, not just a select few
• Data is made available within hours of actual performance, eliminating the need to wait weeks or months for updated government data
• On-time performance is available for both operated and codeshare flights

Request information about FlightStats Analytics
Login to FlightStats Analytics

On-time Performance Ratings
Learn more in the Developer Center about:

• The On-time Performance Ratings Data Feed
• The On-time Performance Request/Response Web services

Historical Data Drops
We have provided a data drop of historical flight information for specific airports or airlines, on a one-off basis.

Airports are clearly in need of accurate, up-to-the-minute flight status to display to passengers on their Flight Information Display Systems (FIDS). Other travel-related properties (hotels, rental car outlets, convention centers) are interested in providing flight information as an added service to customers. Surprisingly, these entities continually struggle to get good data from the airlines, and they data they do get can come at a very high cost.

FlightStats can serve the airport FIDS market either directly as a data provider, or as one of the participants in an integrated solution. The integrated solution brings together software, flat-panel displays, flight data and installation/service into a production-ready, turnkey solution.

To address the FIDS market, FlightStats has developed a Data Feed product that allows customers to create a local database of current flight activity. The data feed is an ideal delivery mechanism for an application like airport FIDS that requires a local cache of flight data. The data feed works as follows: our internal system watches for "change events", that is, any data source reporting information that is a change of status, time, gate assignment, etc. These changes are written to a file as XML, and every 60 seconds the XML changes are compressed and saved as a file on our server. Customers with proper authentication credentials can retrieve these files, as needed, and use the information to update a local database or flight status cache. This information can then be used to build or enhance a custom solution.

Pricing for the data feed varies based on expected use. For airports, pricing is based on the number of airport flight operations per day. For hotels and other applications, pricing varies based on the application and/or number of properties.

Learn more about the Flight Status Data Feed at the Developer Center.

Our large library of Web Services APIs provides a powerful information source for developing sophisticated applications for travel and transportation. Whether you are a software company developing web/mobile products for sale or an in-house developer, the FlightStats APIs are unmatched in terms of breadth and richness of information. Support for XML over HTTP, SOAP and REST protocols gives you the ability to select the approach that best fits your development environment.

Each of the XML Web Services includes documentation, tools and related files needed for a software developer to integrate our data into an existing application.

There are two classes of Web Services offered: Standard and Premium.

Standard Web Services
Standard Web Services can be evaluated for 30 days at no charge. Following the evaluation period, access can be purchased online in the Developer Center. Standard Web Services include:

• Airline Services - Access airline codes and other information about all airlines included in our database. Also includes a set of utility functions for managing code lookup and searching by name.
• Airport Services - Get information about airports including basic information, real-time airport delays, plus commands that aggregate airport information with current conditions and weather forecasts. Also includes a set of utility services that find airports based on zip code, region or territory.
• Flight Status / Flight History Services - Access real-time flight status aggregated from multiple sources including government, airline and airport sources. Flight status can be queried by flight, route, airport departure or airport arrival. Results include operated and codeshare flights worldwide. Historical flight records can also be accessed using these services.
• On-time Performance Rating Services - A statistically-based flight ranking service showing how a flight's recent on-time performance and delay history compared with other flights. Available as a request response API by flight, route, carrier and time of day. Also available is a On-time Performance Ratings Data Feed that can be used to populate a local database or cache.
• Weather Services - Gain access to current conditions worldwide and extended weather forecasts for every U.S. airport.

Additionally, there are a set of RSS feeds that are accessible to any user with a valid account for Standard Web Services. Learn more about these options by visiting the Developer Center:

• Web Services Directory
• RSS Directory

Premium Web Services
For commercial customers under contract, there is a set of Premium Web Services available for integration into in-house or third-party applications.

Learn more by visiting the Web Services Directory in the Developer Center.

Although Itinerary Monitoring, Flight Segment Monitoring and Flight Schedules are discussed elsewhere, they each have a Web Services interface and, therefore, are really part of the Premium Web Services.

FlightStats offers a variety of widgets that you can add to your site in almost no time.

Content syndication is a means of publishing information for use on third party websites. Typical users include travel sites, weather sites, newspaper/television websites, destination sites, airport sites, blogs and individual home pages. There are several mechanisms used for syndicating FlightStats content including:

• iFrame Based Applications include airport delays, airport delays + weather, flight status, airport arrivals & departures, security wait times, on-time performance ratings and flight alerts.
• RSS (Real Simple Syndication) Feeds provide information in a format that can be "read" by numerous RSS clients. US Airport Delays is our only current offering, however several flavors of flight status RSS feeds are completed or in development, and could soon be made available.
• Widgets/Gadgets for accessing flight status, on-time performance ratings plus an all-in-one that includes airport delays, flight status, on-time performance rating and airport information.

A complete listing of the content currently available for syndication can be found in the Downloads Gallery in the Developer Center.

Most of our syndicated content is offered for free, designed to refer traffic back to FlightStats.com. For customers who want access to our content yet want to keep their users captive and not drive them elsewhere, we offer Premium widgets, which are priced to yield a $5 CPM. In certain situations, we are open to working on a revenue share basis.

"FlightStats' unique peformance ratings have enhanced the value of our travel search site. When customers have access beyond price, schedule, and availability to something as valuable as FlightStats, they can find the best travel value."

Brett Snyder, Business Director, Travel
PriceGrabber.com


"The FlightStats contribution was tremendous for our transportation management team. Guest scheduling data (which was a huge source of headaches in Athens '04) was a non-issue here in Torino. Many thanks to you and your development team."

Mark Banga, Senior Project Manager
Sport and Sponsorship Division
Exposoft Solutions Inc.


"We were staggered by the possibilities of the FlightStats system for the travel industry. We developed a SMS notification system that can be integrated into online travel agents booking engines. This way, booking agents can increase customer service levels and create additional revenue per booking. It has been one of the smoothest integration projects we have ever laid our hands on. It is amazing how easy the system works, especially when one considers the vast amount of complex data it contains."

Jeroen van Velzen, Commercial Director
The Sound of Data