Google Flights Scraper

Search Google Flights and emit one structured record per flight option — price, airline, departure/arrival times, duration, and stop count. One-way and round-trip in 4 cabin classes. Pro filters narrow the result set to exactly the flights you want.

What this actor does

• Builds a Google Flights search URL from your airports + dates + cabin class
• Drives a headless Chromium (Playwright) through Apify residential proxy
• Dismisses cookie banners and "Show more flights" buttons
• Parses each flight option from the rendered DOM aria-labels
• Applies Pro filters (airline, stops, layover, duration, fare type)
• Emits one record per flight option

Output per flight option

• price (integer, normalised to your currency input), currency
• airline (display name), airlineCode (IATA, when resolvable)
• flightNumber (when extractable)
• departureAirport (IATA), departureTime
• arrivalAirport (IATA), arrivalTime
• durationMinutes, pricePerHour (derived)
• stops
• cabin, outboundDate, returnDate (echoed from input)
• priceBelowThreshold — only when priceAlertThresholdUsd is set
• recordType: "flight", scrapedAt

Empty fields are omitted from the output (no nulls).

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
originAirport	string	JFK	Origin IATA (3 letters)
destinationAirport	string	LHR	Destination IATA
outboundDate	string	30 days ahead	Departure date YYYY-MM-DD
returnDate	string	–	Return date — empty for one-way
adults	int	1	Adult passengers (1–9)
children	int	0	Child passengers (0–9)
infants	int	0	Infant passengers (0–9)
cabinClass	enum	economy	economy / premium_economy / business / first
currency	enum	USD	Display currency
language	enum	en	Google Flights UI language
country	enum	US	gl country code
maxStops	enum	any	any / nonstop / one_stop / two_or_fewer
airlines	array	[]	IATA airline allowlist (e.g. ["UA","DL"])
excludeAirlines	array	[]	IATA airline blocklist
maxResults	int	50	Hard cap on emitted records
minPrice	int	–	Drop flights below this price (in chosen currency)
maxPrice	int	–	Drop flights above this price
directOnly	bool	false	Alias for maxStops=nonstop
maxLayoverMinutes	int	–	Drop connections with a layover longer than this
maxDurationMinutes	int	–	Drop flights longer than this many minutes
excludeBasicEconomy	bool	false	Drop fares labelled Basic / Light / Saver
priceAlertThresholdUsd	number	–	Tag flights at-or-below this price with priceBelowThreshold: true
useApifyProxy	bool	true	Route through Apify residential proxy (recommended)

Example: cheapest round-trip JFK → LHR

{
  "originAirport": "JFK",
  "destinationAirport": "LHR",
  "outboundDate": "2026-06-15",
  "returnDate": "2026-06-22",
  "cabinClass": "economy",
  "directOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 25
}

Example: business-class SFO → HND with airline allowlist

{
  "originAirport": "SFO",
  "destinationAirport": "HND",
  "outboundDate": "2026-09-10",
  "returnDate": "2026-09-25",
  "cabinClass": "business",
  "airlines": ["NH", "JL", "UA"],
  "maxLayoverMinutes": 240
}

Example: one-way budget search with price alert

{
  "originAirport": "LAX",
  "destinationAirport": "MEX",
  "outboundDate": "2026-04-30",
  "cabinClass": "economy",
  "maxResults": 50,
  "priceAlertThresholdUsd": 200
}

Use cases

• Travel-deal alerts — daily run with priceAlertThresholdUsd, push the matched flights to Slack
• Corporate travel benchmarking — weekly export of business-class prices on key routes
• Price-tracking dashboards — feed each flight option into a time-series store
• Itinerary planning — combine with a hotel scraper for end-to-end trip cost
• Frequent-flyer comparison — enrich with our flight-award-scraper-pro to compare cash vs. miles

FAQ

Does it require a login or cookies? No.

Why does it need an Apify residential proxy? Google rate-limits cloud datacenter IPs aggressively on Flights URLs — without a residential exit you'll typically hit a 429 or captcha. The actor uses Apify residential by default.

Why is airlineCode sometimes missing? Some airlines aren't in our name → IATA lookup yet (we cover ~50 carriers). The display name is always populated when extracted; the code is best-effort.

Why does the run sometimes return 0 flights? Causes (in order of likelihood): (1) Google captcha blocked the page (rotate proxy and retry), (2) the route has no flights on those dates, (3) every flight was filtered out by your Pro filters, (4) Google's DOM changed faster than our extraction. The status message tells you which.

Are multi-city itineraries supported? Not in this MVP. Use multiple separate runs with different origin/destination/date pairs.

Can I get a direct booking link? Booking-deeplink resolution is on the roadmap — Google Flights routes booking through an OTA selector that requires deeper interaction. The current actor returns the price/airline/duration/stops you need to make booking decisions.

What's the difference between economy and excludeBasicEconomy? cabinClass=economy searches the economy cabin (covers Basic, Main, and Premium variants). excludeBasicEconomy drops the cheapest fares within that cabin (those labelled Basic / Light / Saver) — useful when you want a reliable Main Cabin baseline.

Is the price guaranteed? No. Google Flights prices are advisory; the actual price is set by the airline / OTA at booking time. We capture the displayed price at scrape time.