Rayobyte vs Webshare for Travel Fares: Speed, Point of Sale and Cost

Side by side

At the time of writing. See Rayobyte for travel fares and Webshare for travel fares.

Speed

Rayobyte's rotating ISP pool gives fast ISP-grade IPs from a gateway, a good fit for travel sites that accept them. Webshare's static residential lists are cheap and fast too, but a fixed list is reused more often, which travel sites notice.

Costs

Result pages are heavy (around 800 KB). At volume, Rayobyte's residential tiers are cheaper. Use JSON endpoints to cut bandwidth on either.

A real-world example

A fare alert startup checks 2,000 routes daily from three points of sale. Airline JSON endpoints that accept datacenter traffic run on a Webshare list. Two large OTAs that rate-limit repeat IPs run on Rayobyte's rotating ISP pool, which gives a fresh ISP-grade IP per search and fast responses. One OTA that blocks almost everything goes through the Web Unblocker. Each search uses a short sticky session.

Fare collection checklist

• Target the point-of-sale country and set currency and language.
• One sticky session per search.
• Fetch JSON endpoints, not full pages.
• Spread searches over time.
• Record point of sale, currency and time with each fare.

Prioritizing routes

Not every route needs checking daily. Rank routes by search interest or revenue, check the top tier several times a day, the middle tier daily and the long tail weekly. This keeps proxy costs proportional to the value of the data.

Pros and cons for travel

Rayobyte

• Rotating ISP pool for fast searches.
• Web Unblocker for the hardest OTAs.
• Cheaper residential at volume.

Webshare

• Cheap lists for lenient fare APIs.
• 195 point-of-sale countries.

Bottom line

Use Webshare lists for lenient APIs and Rayobyte for protected OTAs and speed.

If you're still shortlisting, compare these options with the wider market in our best proxies guide, and use our cheap proxies guide to estimate a sensible budget.

Key takeaways

• Target the point-of-sale country on either.
• Rayobyte's rotating ISP pool suits fast fare collection.
• Rayobyte is cheaper for residential at volume and adds managed fallbacks.
• Webshare lists suit lighter, cheaper collection on lenient APIs.

FAQ

Which is better for flight scraping?

Rayobyte for speed and volume; Webshare for cheap lists on lenient endpoints.

Do fares differ by proxy country?

Yes.

How can I reduce bandwidth?

Use the JSON endpoints that load results.

Why do OTAs block fare scraping?

Searches cost them money with their suppliers, so they limit automated volume.

Can I cache fares?

Briefly; fares change quickly, so cache only for minutes on busy routes.

Can I use static IPs for fare searches?

For lenient APIs, yes; busy OTAs notice repeated searches from the same IPs.

Sources and further reading

Independent references that back up the points above, from standards bodies, governments, universities and non-profits. They open in a new tab.

• Bandwidth (computing) (Wikipedia): What bandwidth means, the unit most residential proxies are priced by.
• IPv4 Depletion and Transfers (ARIN): Background on IPv4 run-out, which is why IPv4 proxies cost more than IPv6.
• RFC 6585: Additional HTTP Status Codes (429 Too Many Requests) (IETF / RFC Editor): Defines status 429, the code sites send when you make too many requests.
• RFC 9293: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) (IETF / RFC Editor): The current TCP specification, the transport under HTTP and SOCKS proxies.
• RFC 6265: HTTP State Management Mechanism (Cookies) (IETF / RFC Editor): The cookie standard, which ties a session together regardless of IP.