Setting Up A Website

lufcgirl

Hi,

Don't know where to start really! I'm 25, and been unemployed for the past few months and really just looking for something to do with my spare time.

I've noticed recently, theres a lot of promotions on the Ryanair website for £1/£5/£10 flights (myself having taken advantage of them). My aim is basically to try and create a website whereby you could put in say you wanted to fly from Stanstead, weren't bothered about dates or where it was to as long as it was a £1 flight and then the results come up.

The only things I've found that are similar are the MSE flightchecker, and Skyscanner, both of these however you have to put where you want to travel to in, and theres no way to select an upper limt cost (MSE does this but not Skyscanner). Ryanair don't have this sort of service either.

It's not that I want to make a career out of it, I'd just like to be able to offer this sort of service when searching (it'd help me out a great deal!). I'm going to sound like a right idiot, but I've been thinking about it for months and I take it the next step is to find out if it's even viable to be able to make that type of search available on a website. Then a domain name and then find someone to build it!

Does anyone have any experience of this or any problems I may encounter, or even places I could go to for advice?

Thanks

Browntoa

Ryanair was cancelling any flights bought via a screenscaper site

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/2510867/Ryanair-takes-action-against-website-screen-scraping.html

lufcgirl

I don't actually want to let people book a flight through the website, I'd obviously just advise to go to the Ryanair website to do that. It was just a search facility I was after thats all!

Ste_C

On the MSE flightchecker you don't have to put in your destination, you can leave it blank by selecting "I'll go anywhere"...

How do you intend to make money from the site?

faevilangel

to be blunt, its a complicated coding, as you would need to get the data from the ryanair website, then put it in a format that you can search

i am just searching to see if ryanair supply an API to be able to access their data, but its done with a scripting language such as asp / php / actionscript and isn't for the faint hearted

lufcgirl

I don't want to make money from the website. I just want to set it up so I have some sort of useful database of cheap flights which I hope will help out others too.

I have a friend who is doing a degree in website design so he's going to build it as part of his work, that is of course if we can get the data from Ryanair onto the website.

Ste_C

You should always aim to make money from it! :cool:

It might be quite expensive to run though with hosting and the search coding being quite laborious to set up so it would be good to have some sort of income stream, be it advertising or commission.

Rael

Is affiliation not your best bet?

save-a-lot

Ryanair do not have an affiliate program and as such will not have XML feeds for their data. Your idea is a none-starter really if you want to focus on that particular company.

redbandit

I would suggest you look at affiliate/becoming a partner of ryanair. Even though you don't want to or are not interested in making profit, they may have a system by where you can list there deals on your website as an internal (to your website) search facility. Not all companies do this, but companies usualy selling non phsical goods are quite likely to especialy thoughs selling music downloads or holidays/flights. Go to the partner/affiliate section of there website to see whether they do or not.

Good luck.

bingo_bango

Ryanair don't operate an affiliate or partner scheme. That's a non-starter straightaway.

Such a site would need to have Ryanair as part of it's inventory or it's defunct from day one. Perhaps look at doing something for the US market? You don't have to live there to make a living there.