How can I connect my Rails travel app to a flight booking API so users can search and book flights through the app?
How can I allow users from different countries to see and pay for travel bookings in their own currency?
From your PSP of choice (Stripe / Braintree / 3C / etc) then you can enable Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) which allows for your customer to choose either your base currency (perhaps GBP if you’re located in England) or their currency of choice. Usually (but not always) the customer will get a more favorable rate of conversion by going through their financial institution as compared with the exchange rates of a PSP.
How can I connect my Rails travel app to a flight booking API so users can search and book flights through the app?
There are three main players in the Global Distributions Systems network that do flight bookings. Of those the one with the best support for Ruby is Sabre, which can be called with this gem.
Amadeus is also a good option based on GDS. (And here’s a sample app from some time ago that only does hotel bookings with their API, but flight bookings would be similar).
To avoid GDS then you can go more direct to carriers with Duffel, and here’s an older gem that does this. Avoids the whole GDS overhead entirely.
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