Skyscanner Live vs Indicative Prices
Compare Skyscanner Flights Live Prices and Indicative Prices across freshness, use case, latency, booking confidence and rate limits.
Live and Indicative APIs do not provide the same pricing confidence. Live Prices queries supply partners for a concrete search context; Indicative Prices provides cached lowest-price signals for browse and discovery use cases.
Comparison
| Dimension | Live Prices | Indicative Prices |
|---|---|---|
| Freshness | Real-time partner search | Cached |
| Skyscanner docs | Current best prices | Last-seen lowest price |
| Cache age | Create can return a fast cached subset before polling completes | Prices can be up to 4 days old |
| Use case | Bookable flight search | Browse, SEO, flexible date/destination |
| Workflow | create + poll | single search |
| Booking confidence | Higher | Lower / estimate |
| Standard rate limits | Create 100/s,100/min; Poll 100/s,500/min | 100/s,500/min |
Live workflow
/create
-> fast initial subset
-> sessionToken
-> /poll
-> fuller live result set
-> itinerary refresh if neededMeasure time to first result separately from time to completion.
Indicative workflow
The indicative cache stores lowest prices seen from traveler/supply searches by route/date. It is not an exact bookable price.
It fits month calendars, destination inspiration, SEO price ranges and budget exploration.
Anti-pattern
Do not present indicative price as:
- checkout price,
- guaranteed fare,
- bookable offer.
Product architecture
Low intent discovery -> Indicative
High intent search -> Live
Selected itinerary -> Refresh
Booking handoff -> Agent/providerObservability
Track indicative cache age, live time-to-first-result, live time-to-complete, indicative→live delta, live→refresh delta and landing-price mismatch.
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Sources
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