Duffel is a great company that offers APIs for flights & stays (hotels). Today, we’ll be looking at the flight experience, as the two have some differences.
Duffel’s flight API comes with a tonne of quality content & functionality. From a content standpoint, it powers 112 airlines through Travelport’s APIs, while it also has another 30 direct connections (whether NDC or on the LCC side), which makes it a great product with a variety of unique content.
API Key Features
From a functionality standpoint, Duffel offers serious capabilities, from the obvious search and book, to seat maps, cancellations, exchanges, involuntary schedule changes and more! Check out this API reference page to explore their full capabilities offered within the Flights API.
Logistics (API keys, certification, etc)
Logistics are key here, as many APIs in travel tech offer a painful service when it comes to API documentation, access to API keys and other steps throughout the integration timeline. Duffel is probably the leader in this category across flight based APIs.
Duffel’s API docs are all available here. The documentation is impressively well structured and defined that it puts 99% of API providers to shame how well they’ve done in this space. API keys are super simple, just sign up through their website and within 30 seconds you have access to a set of API keys.
Duffel’s onboarding flow is insanely perfect, that it really makes it dead simple to onboard and start the integration process, over and above any other competitor in this space. This is the perfect solution for a start-up & early stage scale-up that’s looking to self-serve onboard and get started quick, while also still controlling their own margins… which brings us onto the next chapter… commercials.
Logistic score: 10/10
Commercials Before we touch on commercials, there’s a couple key elements of their products that makes them impeccable for start-ups and scale-ups. With Duffel, you are able to offer full servicing capabilities (search, book, cancel, exchange, etc) without having to be an accredited travel agency. Historically, you had to be an accredited agency, which meant a lot of bureaucratic steps (taking months on end) and, on average, a bank balance well in the 5 figures, in order to prove you had financial stability to manage transactions.
Duffel enables you to use their accreditation, at a nominal 1% fee that is added on each booking made, so that you don’t have to stress about getting all this done in order to start selling travel. Above and beyond that, meaning you now manage full service capabilities, means that you are now able to manage your own margins, which is incredible for start-ups and scale-ups wanting to make sure they can adjust their commission as they please, on each booking.
This simple model is called the ‘Pay as you go’ model at Duffel, and you can find out more about it here. The beauty of the pay as you go model is there are no upfront costs or monthly fees, Duffel makes money only when you make money (in other words, when you make a booking), so there are no out of pocket costs around this.
For enterprise businesses, there is the enterprise pricing model which does not outline concrete numbers on Duffel’s website, this will usually be negotiated with them directly, based on your current volume of bookings & projections. Other than that, Duffel charges a nominal fee of $3 per booking, which again is paid so by your customers, therefore making it a no upfront cost model for you as a travel seller.
The last piece of advice is taking into consideration Duffel’s look to book (L2B) ratio fees. L2B is basically Duffel making sure that you maintain a certain level of searches made on your platform vs conversions into 1 booking made. The positive side is that Duffel clearly states the numbers so it is available for you to check, track and make sure your business is sound and not pushing a lot of transactions (searches) that don’t convert into bookings.
You can find out more about Duffel’s L2B ratio here, but for ease, Duffel will start charging $0.005 per excess search after you hit 1500:1 search to book ratio. Commercials score: 9.5
Tech
Duffel Flights' API is RESTful, and contains a variety of GET, PUT, DEL, POST endpoints. All in all, a very stable, reliable and simple API.Who is this for?
On the commercial side, Duffel has made it so that enterprise businesses can make use of their products, but I’d say the majority of the use cases for using Duffel are for start-ups and scale-ups looking for:
- A self-serve approach to accessing keys & documentation.
- Pay as you go model with no upfront keys.
- Ability to control my destiny when it comes to managing my margins. No pre-set commissions, you choose what you want to make per booking.
With that being said, we love Duffel and fully stand by the notion that this is probably the best flight based API for start-up / scale-up travel seller businesses. At Trapi, we have simplified the integration process for you. Even a great API like Duffel will generally take weeks, if not months, to integrate to. At Trapi, we use AI to fully customise the integration based on your custom needs of your platform, while contextualising the API documentation of Duffel.
Duffel is available today to integrate to, you can find it in our marketplace today. We hope you enjoy a swift Duffel integration with us today.
Overall score: 8.7