Yahoo Travel Trip Plan APIs Now Live

Yahoo posted last week that the Yahoo! Travel Trip Plan API is live.  I went poking around and the API looks pretty neat.  Developers can retrieve either public or private trips created in Yahoo.  This is an interesting move for Yahoo, though it's not clear whom they expect to use the API.  I can't see competitors (SideStep, TripAdvisor, Travelocity all compete with the breadth of services available within Yahoo Travel) using Yahoo's Trip Planner, as Yahoo will steer users into its own network.  And, a limit of 5000 requests a day seems to eliminate big partners.  Perhaps it's a quest to conquer the long tail of travel (see a quick app that Dan Theurer wrote).  If so, I wish them luck!  Nonetheless, I commend Yahoo for inviting developers into their community.  Travel technology tends to be very closely guarded and it's good to see a company that wants to open things up. 

On that note, Kayak is also making attempts to be developer-friendly with its developer site.  Kayak has the typical search widgets you'd expect to allow someone to add a search form to their Web site.  They also have a Konfabulator widget, functionality to iintegrate with their hotel database (some of the documentation here looks a bit outdated, but the idea of making hotel data transfer easier is promising), and some cool toolbar prototypes.

Comments

[Mark Vane]

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