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Pro Users

The Live Search API cannot be used by Seats.aero Pro users at this time. Live Search requires a commercial agreement with Seats.aero.

The live search API allows you to search our supported mileage programs for any city pair and date. It does not have to be one of our supported routes and the search results will be discarded and not displayed on the Seats.aero site.

Live Search does not accept the cached-data endpoints' min_cabin_pct parameter. To include mixed-cabin itineraries where the mileage program supports them, set disable_filters to true. Results with a computed mixed-cabin percentage include MixedCabinPct, the percentage of the journey's distance flown below the trip's reported Cabin. The field is omitted when no distance is flown below that cabin. Note that disable_filters also disables the dynamic-pricing and mismatched-airport filters.

It is important that you build proper error handling when performing live searches. Live searches can fail for any reason, including the airline themselves being down. You should ensure you build a good experience for your users and systems when they fail. Failed live searches are not counted against your quota, but you should limit your retries and use exponential backoff when possible.

Set smart_cache to true to opt into a cached fallback when the live search fails or the requested program is unavailable. Seats.aero will look for cached availability matching the exact mileage program, origin, destination, and departure date from the request. The fallback also honors seat_count, disable_filters, and show_dynamic_pricing; it does not broaden the search criteria to find a result. Definitive unsupported-source or unsupported-route responses do not use the fallback.

A successful fallback returns the normal 200 live-search response with cached: true. If no matching cached search exists, the original live-search error is returned. Cache-resolved requests count against the live-search quota as successful requests, but they are not billed as live provider searches. The fallback is opt-in and is never used when smart_cache is omitted or false.

Supported Programs

The live search API supports all programs on Seats.aero. Check the Concepts page for a list of supported mileage programs.

Limitations

• Dynamic price filtering is still applied to live searches by default, which means expensive options are not returned unless disabled. Read more about our dynamic price filtering here.
• Identifiers returned directly by live provider searches, such as availability IDs and trip IDs, are synthetic and will not work with the rest of our APIs. Cached fallback results retain their stored identifiers.
• Cached fallback data is available only for routes and dates already tracked by Seats.aero. A cache miss does not cause the API to broaden or change the supplied search criteria.
• You should expect a response to take about 5-15 seconds, varying mostly on your selected mileage program. Response times can improve at higher volume as we warm our internal caches.