How I got amazing boarding passes with JS.

#javascript #node #webdev

Back Story

A group of friends an I were taking a trip to Florida for a week and we needed to check in for our flights which is never fun. We're taking Southwest Airlines which for those of you that may not know, they do not have assigned seating. The seating is on a first come first serve basis which makes your boarding pass/position very important.

We had a 6:05am flight so we needed to check in at 6:05am the day before. One of my friends joked "Couldn't you make a bot for this?", most of my experience is with bots and automation so this was a clever joke which i took very serious.

The Process

Taking a look at the check in page, there is a simple form which requires your Confirmation Number, First Name, and Last Name.

I entered my information and watched the requests in my dev tools...

After clicking Check In i see a POST request to their API to the url https://www.southwest.com/api/air-checkin/v1/air-checkin/page/air/check-in/review and got an error response that my check in window has not started yet.

This was enough information to assume that the check in process is a single request. I viewed the request body and the format was very simple JSON.

{
  "confirmationNumber": "A1B2C3",
  "passengerFirstName": "John",
  "passengerLastName": "Doe",
  "application": "air-check-in",
  "site": "southwest"
}

I copied the url and post data into Insomnia to test the request outside of the browser to see if there were any Anti-Bot or user specific cookies that would prevent me from simply spamming requests to check in.

I got a different response error in Insomnia... I looked back at my dev tools and took a look at the request headers they send, I noticed the header X-API-Key, copying the header and the key from the requests into Insomnia. We got the outside of check in window error! Now i know that there's no other headers or cookies needed to make the request which meant I could keep sending the request.

I then used that bot the next day and secured very good boarding passes for my girlfriend and I.