I wanted to know the technical details of how an online air ticketing/ hotel booking site works (expedi.com or hotels.com or orbitz.com, etc.)? The specific question is how online site brings the result when someone make search for ticket booking? Does online site has access to airlines and hotel's database? So that whenever someone make search online then that site connects to all participating airlines or hotels database and query them and after that do mining on those data and show it to end user? And when user purchases any ticket then how airlines or hotels database gets updated?
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Answers by: Serg.Potap | Fear of Fish | JSO1 | Adam Thorsen
It's different depending on which service they use. For hotels they generally have a database of available hotels with an agreement that the hotel will keep a certain number of rooms always available. So, for example if the hotel has 100 rooms, they will guarantee they will always keep 10 of those rooms available for online booking, they are contacted by email once a booking has been made and paid for. 99% of these travel services e.g. Expedia, use an affiliate scheme by someone like Active Hotels or similar that do all the booking, canvassing for new hotels etc. for you.
Airlines have gone down the more direct route, and they have a dedicated booking system that gives realtime booking availablity, but this is shifting more to web services now, as are most booking services like car rental, airline booking, hotel booking, etc.
So to summarize, hotels usually set aside a number of rooms to keep free for online booking, and airlines have realtime booking through a dedicated network service.