Getting started with the Duffel API ✈️

So, you're at a hackathon and want the fastest and easiest way to search and book flights? 🎉 Duffel is the tool for you.

In this guide, you'll find everything you need to get started.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Our airline partners
• Getting started
  • Signing up
  • Creating your first access token
• Building your integration
  • First steps
  • Searching for flights
  • Creating an order
• Help!

Introduction

With the Duffel API, you can search and book flights with more than 20 airlines through one simple platform.

We package up flights from all of our great airline partners into one easy to integrate REST API.

We're powered by direct connections' to airlines reservation systems, which means we get the best prices.

Our airline partners

With Duffel, today you can book with:

• Aegean Airlines
• American Airlines
• Austrian
• British Airways
• Brussels Airlines
• Cathay Pacific
• Emirates
• Iberia
• LEVEL
• Lufthansa
• Olympic Air
• Qatar Airways
• Singapore Airlines
• SWISS
• Transavia
• United
• Virgin Atlantic
• Vueling
• WestJet

When you sign up, you'll only have access to a few airlines. For access to more, just get in touch with us.

Getting started

To use the Duffel API, you'll need to sign up for an account and then create an access token.

If you prefer to watch a video, you can watch a short 8 minute workshop on the Duffel API on YouTube here.

Signing up

You can sign up for an account on the Duffel website - it takes about one minute.

Just head to https://app.duffel.com/join and enter your name, email address and password and you'll be good to go, with instant access to our sandbox.

Creating your first access token

To create your access token, head to your dashboard, click on your organisation name, then click "Developers", then "Access tokens", and then "New token".

Give your access token a name, and leave the scope as "Read write". Click the "Create token" button, and then you'll have your first token for our sandbox.

Building your integration

First steps

You'll find our API documentation at https://duffel.com/docs/api/overview/welcome.

We'd recommend reading the "Key Principles" section first to understand the most important concepts in our API.

Searching for flights

To search for flights, you'll need to create an offer request.

An offer request describes the passengers and where and when they want to travel (in the form of a list of slices). It may also include additional filters (e.g. a particular cabin to travel in).

We'll send your search to a range of airlines, and return your offer request back to you with a series of offers.

Each offer represents a set of flights you can buy from an airline at a particular price that meet your search criteria.

Inside the offers, you'll see your slices, but now each slice will also include a list of one or more specific flights (called segments) that the airline is offering to get the passengers where they want to go.

Creating an order

Once you've found an offer that you want to book, you'll need to create an order.

Airlines' sandboxes can be a bit unreliable when you try to book, so we would recommend picking an offer from Duffel Airways, our own sandbox airline, when you book. To get an offer back from Duffel Airways, you'll have to search for one adult flying from LHR to JFK.

To do this, just pass in the ID of the offer you selected, some basic information about the passengers and your payment information. In our sandbox, you can pay using your Duffel Balance - it's unlimited 🎉

Experimenting with the API in Postman

We've created a Postman collection to make it easy to get started with the API.

To download it, click here and then save the file to your computer.

To import it into Postman, open Postman, click "Import" and then "Upload Files", and then browse to the file that you just saved. The "Duffel API" collection will appear in the sidebar.

To set your access token for the API, find the "Duffel API" collection in the sidebar, hover over it and click the "..." button, then click "Edit", then head to the "Variables" tab, and fill in your access token in the Current Value column.

You can now run through the requests in the collection one-by-one to search, book and cancel your first order. We'll automatically pick an offer for you from Duffel Airways to make sure you have a great experience.

Help!

There are three ways to get help with our API - before, during and after the hackathon:

• Drop by the #01-apis-duffel channel in the TravelScrum Slack
• Join our Slack at https://slack.duffel.com
• Send us an email at [email protected]