Cheapest Plane Tickets Scraper

Find the cheapest flights on Trip.com by comparing direct routes and creative multi-city combinations.

🎯 What It Does

Discovers cheap flights using two strategies:

• Direct Routes: TPE → PRG (standard round-trip)
• Alternative Routes: TPE → HKG → PRG (multi-city combinations)

⚠️ Note: This is a price discovery tool. Alternative routes may have timing conflicts—verify manually on Trip.com before booking.

🚀 Quick Start

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Run locally
apify run

# Deploy to Apify
apify login
apify push

📥 Input

Required:

• mainDepartureCity - Departure airport code (e.g., TPE)
• targetCity - Destination airport code (e.g., PRG)
• cabinClass - Y (Economy), C (Business), F (First)
• numberOfPeople - Passengers (1-9)

Optional:

• timePeriods - Travel dates (defaults to 30 days from now)
• alternativeDepartureCities - Intermediate cities (e.g., ["HKG", "ICN"])
• airlines - Filter by airlines
• maxRequestsPerCrawl - Request limit (default: 1000)

📊 Output

Dataset sorted by price (cheapest first) with:

• Route type (direct/alternative)
• Total price (TWD)
• Departure/destination/intermediate cities
• Travel dates and duration
• Complete flight details

🔍 How It Works

Direct Route (2 steps)

1. Search outbound flights (TPE → PRG) - select top 3
2. For each outbound, search inbound flights (PRG → TPE)
3. Save all combinations

Alternative Route (4 steps)

1. Leg 1 Out: TPE → HKG (top 3)
2. Leg 1 In: HKG → PRG (best only)
3. Leg 2 Out: PRG → HKG (top 3)
4. Leg 2 In: HKG → TPE (all combinations)
5. Save complete 4-leg journeys

⚠️ Leg 1 searches same-day connections for price reference only—transfer times not validated.

🛠️ Technical Details

• Framework: Crawlee + Playwright
• Data Source: Trip.com Taiwan API (SSE + JSON)
• Storage: Results stored in key-value store, then sorted and saved to dataset
• Concurrency: 3 parallel requests
• Performance: ~40 requests for 2 time periods + 2 intermediate cities