What TimeTable Lookup does and who it is for
TimeTable Lookup, provided by FlightLookup, is built for developers who need structured flight schedule data rather than live pricing or seat availability. The distinguishing feature is the dynamic connections engine: rather than returning only direct flights between two airports, the API can construct multi-leg itineraries, making it useful for any application that needs to present realistic travel options, not just nonstop routes.
The coverage includes both traditional network carriers and low-cost carriers worldwide, which matters because many schedule data providers historically skipped budget airlines. The API supports single-day, 7-day, and multi-day schedule lookups, and search criteria can be filtered by time window, airline, interline arrangements, number of routes, and number of connections.
With nearly 4,700 marketplace subscribers and a popularity score of 9.9 out of 10, it is clearly a well-adopted data source. The reported average latency of 71 ms and a 100% success rate suggest the infrastructure is stable and fast enough for production use.
Endpoint walkthrough
The 28 endpoints fall into four functional groups.
Flight schedules
The core of the API is a single parameterized GET request:
GET /TimeTable/{From}/{To}/{Date}/You supply an origin airport code, a destination airport code, and a date. The response uses the FlightLookup Routing Engine to return scheduled flights, including segment-level detail and, where applicable, connecting itineraries built by the dynamic connections engine. This is the endpoint that consumes your monthly quota, so plan your call volume around it.
Airport information (14 endpoints)
This group is the largest and arguably the most versatile standalone set. It lets you:
- Retrieve metadata for a specific airport by IATA code
- List all airports in a country or metro area
- Enumerate which carriers operate out of an airport
- Pull nonstop, direct, or combined route lists for an airport — optionally filtered by airline
- Find the nearest airports to a geographic coordinate (latitude/longitude) or a named location within a country
- List country and metro IATA codes
These endpoints are useful both as supporting lookups during timetable queries and as standalone data sources for building route maps or airport pickers.
Airline information (6 endpoints)
The airline group lets you explore carrier networks:
- Which countries an airline operates in
- Which airports in a specific country an airline serves
- Nonstop and direct flights for an airline, optionally from a given airport
- A full list of airlines and their operating countries
This is helpful for features like "airlines flying from this airport" or for filtering the timetable query before you make it.
Reference codes (3 endpoints)
Three lightweight endpoints return IATA reference lists: entertainment codes, equipment (aircraft type) codes, and meal codes used by airlines. These are lookup tables you would typically cache once and use to decode values returned in schedule responses.
Pricing breakdown
TimeTable Lookup uses a freemium model with four tiers.
| Plan | Price/month | Monthly requests | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| BASIC | $0 | 100 | — |
| PRO | $125 | 5,000 | 100 req/sec |
| ULTRA | $925 | 100,000 | 100 req/sec |
| MEGA | $1,500 | 1,000,000 | 500 req/sec |
The BASIC tier's 100 requests per month is enough to explore the API and confirm the response format works for your use case, but it is not sufficient for anything beyond prototyping. A simple travel widget that makes one timetable call per user session would exhaust the free tier in an afternoon of moderate testing.
PRO at $125/month and 5,000 requests is a reasonable entry point for low-traffic internal tools or small consumer apps. For reference, 5,000 monthly requests averages to about 167 calls per day — adequate if users are searching specific routes rather than browsing broadly.
ULTRA is marked as the recommended plan. At 100,000 requests per month it suits mid-size travel applications, and the $925 price tag reflects that it is positioning itself as a professional data tier rather than a startup offering. The per-request cost at ULTRA works out to roughly $0.00925.
MEGA at $1,500/month with 1,000,000 requests and a higher 500 req/sec rate limit is for high-volume platforms — aggregators, OTAs, or enterprise tools where schedule queries happen at scale.
Practical use cases
Flight search front-ends: The timetable endpoint combined with connection building covers the core data need for a flight search UI. You are not getting fares here, but you can present schedules and let another API layer handle pricing.
Route availability tools: The airline and airport route endpoints let you answer questions like "which carriers fly nonstop from JFK to LHR" or "what routes does a given airline operate from Frankfurt" without consuming timetable quota.
Airport and airline data enrichment: Applications that display flight information — check-in apps, travel dashboards, corporate travel tools — can use the reference endpoints to decode equipment types, meal options, and entertainment services into human-readable labels.
Geo-based airport discovery: The nearest-airports endpoint (by lat/lon or by location name within a country) is handy for mobile apps that want to surface relevant airports based on a user's location.
Limitations and things to check before integrating
Monthly quota, not daily: Requests are capped monthly, not daily or hourly. This means a burst of activity early in a billing cycle can exhaust the quota well before the month ends. Design your application with caching in mind — especially for reference code lists and route data that changes infrequently.
No live pricing or availability: TimeTable Lookup provides schedule data. It does not include seat availability, booking classes, or fare information. If your use case requires real-time inventory or prices, you need a separate GDS or airline API alongside this one.
Request count scope: It is worth confirming with FlightLookup's documentation whether all 28 endpoints count equally against the monthly quota or whether only timetable calls are metered. Reference endpoints like meal codes or equipment lists are good candidates to cache aggressively regardless.
Documentation is a PDF: The provider's documentation is a PDF hosted at flightlookup.com. This is less convenient than interactive docs or an OpenAPI spec, so plan extra time for initial integration and schema discovery.
BASIC rate limits: The BASIC tier has no published rate limit, which could be a restriction to verify during testing. The paid tiers publish explicit limits (100 or 500 req/sec), which are more than sufficient for most applications.
Getting started
Sign up through the marketplace, subscribe to the BASIC plan, and make a few calls to the airport information endpoints first — they are simpler responses and will help you understand the IATA code conventions used throughout. Then test the core timetable endpoint with a known busy route to see connection-building in action. Cache the three reference code endpoints immediately; their data changes rarely and there is no reason to spend quota on repeated fetches. Once you have validated the response structure against your application's data model, upgrade to PRO or ULTRA based on your realistic monthly call projections.
