If you built a travel app on the Amadeus Self-Service API, your keys stopped working on 17 July 2026. If you are starting one now, the free test tier that many older tutorials still point to is gone.
I spent a day reading the shutdown coverage and the pricing pages of the alternatives, and checking what is still online on Amadeus's side. Here is what I found, and what I could not check.
What actually happened
PhocusWire reported on 9 February 2026 that Amadeus told users, in a letter, that it would pause new registrations and fully close the self-service portal on 17 July. Amadeus said it was decommissioning only the self-service section and that its Enterprise APIs stay available. It did not give a reason, according to that report.
On 1 November 2026 I looked for the traces myself:
- The old test host,
test.api.amadeus.com, has no DNS record. - All 20 repositories in Amadeus's
amadeus4devGitHub organisation are archived. - The banner on developers.amadeus.com says the self-service portal "has been decommissioned on July 17th" and that the site is now for the Enterprise portal only.
There is no one-for-one replacement
Self-Service did several jobs: flight price search, booking, airport and airline lookups, and flight status. The alternatives each cover one or two.
- Prices only: SerpApi lists a free plan of 250 searches a month, and SearchApi lists 100 free requests. These return search results, not tickets.
- Booking tickets: Duffel lets you create a test token on sign-up, but going live needs verification and KYC checks. Its pricing page lists $3.00 per order.
- Airport, airline and status data: AirLabs and Aviationstack. Aviationstack's free plan is 100 requests a month and is non-commercial.
- Seat maps and hotels: none of the vendor pages I read claim to replace these. That is Enterprise territory.
The cost trap nobody mentions
Duffel charges $0.005 per search once you pass 1,500 searches per order. With 10 orders, 15,000 searches are free. For a shop that sells a lot, that is nothing. For a price tracker where people browse a lot and rarely book, the ratio can flip the economics. Do the arithmetic with your own numbers before you choose.
What I did not verify
- I did not sign up to or call any of these APIs, so I have no first-hand numbers on speed or accuracy.
- I did not read the full terms of SerpApi, SearchApi or Sabre.
- Claims from Ignav and AirLabs are vendor claims, because they sell the services they recommend.
- My Amadeus checks are one machine on one day.
Which flight API did you move to after the shutdown, and how long did the switch take? I would like to hear what surprised you.
I wrote up the full comparison, with a worked cost example and a migration checklist, on the APIHiver blog: https://apihiver.com/blog/amadeus-api-alternatives
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