Techtalks: Traveltech

We are looking for a cost effective way to make it easier for our users to provide accurate flight details for itineraries that they have already booked; their manual data entry is frequently inaccurate, which leads to downstream confusion. 

• We collect minimal info - carrier, flight number, and arrival and departure data (airport, date/time). Our volume is fairly low, on the order of a few hundred requests a month.

We see 2 options so far -

1. Parse the users' confirmation emails with an API such as AwardWallet or Amadeus trip parser API. 

• These have their limitations for us - AW is too expensive for our low volume, and (in the test environment) the Amadeus trip-parser is slow and often incomplete.   I see reports on stack overflow that only a limited set of providers are covered in Amadeus. 
• This approach also seems inherently unstable and inefficient, given how varied providers' confirmation email formats are, and much other non-itinerary content they contain.

2. Retrieve the PNR data using the user's record locator, and parse it into our data structure. 

• This approach seems more straightforward and reliable, and there seem to be several PNR parsing APIs out there. 
• But it is not clear to me what the most appropriate options are for posting a record locator and last name, and retriving the PNR record.
• Some of the bigger APIs will be too expensive for us, and our use case is very narrow - just a simple read-only retrieval.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about either of these approaches?  Are there other approaches we should consider?

Thanks.