Flight Status integration

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The Flight Status integration connects Pushwoosh to AeroDataBox, a flight-data provider, so a customer journey can watch a specific passenger’s flight and react the moment its status changes: a new gate, a delay, boarding, arrival, or a cancellation.

Integration overview

Integration type

Source: you subscribe a booking to its flight from inside a journey. Pushwoosh sends the status changes back as an event you use later in that same journey.

Prerequisites

Before connecting Flight Status, make sure you have:

• An active Pushwoosh account with an application in Pushwoosh’s NUE data center. Flight Status isn’t available in other data centers yet.
• An AeroDataBox account and API key. The feed is billed on your own AeroDataBox account.
• A booking event that carries the flight’s carrier, number, date, and departure airport (see Build the flight status journey).
• A dedicated API Access token for the journey to authenticate with.

How does the integration work?

You connect your AeroDataBox key once, in Settings → 3rd-party integrations. From there, watching a flight happens per booking, inside a customer journey: a Webhook step calls Pushwoosh’s own public API to subscribe that booking to its flight, and Pushwoosh posts a PW_FlightStatusChanged event back to the app every time something changes.

Data flow

Connecting the integration and watching one flight are two separate steps, done at different times:

1. Connect your AeroDataBox key in Settings → 3rd-party integrations.
2. A booking event enters a passenger into your journey.
3. The journey’s Webhook step subscribes that booking to its flight through Pushwoosh’s public API.
4. Pushwoosh watches the flight with AeroDataBox and detects changes: gate, delay, boarding, arrival, cancellation, or a baggage belt assignment.
5. Each change is delivered to the app as a PW_FlightStatusChanged event, which the journey’s Wait for Trigger and Condition split route to the right message.

Use cases

Flight Status covers four kinds of updates, each usable on its own or combined in one journey:

Gate change alerts

Notify passengers the moment their departure gate changes.

Delay notifications

Alert passengers once a flight’s delay passes a few minutes, so they can adjust their plans.

Boarding and arrival updates

Tell passengers when boarding opens or their flight lands.

Baggage claim

Send the baggage belt number as soon as it’s assigned.

Set up the integration

Connect Flight Status to Pushwoosh

Connect your AeroDataBox key once per application:

1. Open your application and go to Settings → 3rd-party integrations.
2. Under Available services, find the Flight Status card and click Configure.

3. Paste your AeroDataBox key into API key and click Connect.

4. The card moves to Connected services. Reopen it from there any time to replace the key. The field only ever shows the last few characters of what’s stored, and leaving it empty on save keeps the current key.

If the key is rejected

Pushwoosh checks the key against AeroDataBox in the background and shows one of these messages on the card if something’s wrong:

Message	Cause
provider rejected the API key	The key is invalid or was revoked in AeroDataBox
provider account is out of credits	Your AeroDataBox plan has run out of credits
provider rate limit reached	AeroDataBox is throttling requests, and this clears on its own
provider is unavailable	AeroDataBox couldn’t be reached, due to a network issue or an outage on either side
provider refused the request	AeroDataBox returned an error Pushwoosh doesn’t otherwise recognize

Hinweis

Removing the key doesn’t remove existing subscriptions. The active-subscriptions count on the card keeps including them until they end on their own or you delete them from the journey.

Disconnect the integration

Open the Flight Status card from Connected services and remove the key. Journeys already watching a flight keep their subscriptions. Disconnecting only stops new ones from being created.

Build the flight status journey

Prerequisites for the journey itself:

• A booking event carrying the flight’s carrier, number, date (YYYY-MM-DD), and departure airport, plus one attribute holding the flight key in <carrier><number>/<date>/<departure airport> format, for example LH400/2026-09-20/MUC. This is what session matching uses throughout the journey.
• A dedicated API Access token. The subscribe method accepts any token from your account, with no permissions to grant. Create one specifically for this journey so you can revoke it later without touching anything else.
• Your data center’s public API host. For NUE accounts, that’s rpc-api.svc-nue.pushwoosh.com.
• The journey’s Campaign entry limit, turned off. Campaign entry limit tracks entries per user only. It doesn’t know about the session identifier you set up below, so it would block a passenger’s second flight until the limit period passes.

Start the journey from a booking event

1. Add a Trigger-based entry and select your booking event, for example flight_booked.
2. Under Control how many sessions a user can have at the same time, choose Multiple active sessions per user.
3. Pick the flight-key attribute as the session identifier. This lets the same passenger track more than one flight at once, each in its own session.

Subscribe the booking with a Webhook step

Add a Webhook step directly after the entry. Its request body pulls the flight fields from the entry event, so the step needs to sit right after entry to use them.

1. Set REQUEST TYPE to POST.
2. Set URL to https://rpc-api.svc-nue.pushwoosh.com/api/integrations/flight-status/subscriptions.
3. In HEADERS, keep Content-Type: application/json.
4. Add a header Authorization: Token <your API token>. Pushwoosh masks this value after you save, because any header named Authorization is treated as a secret automatically. See Mark a header value as secret for what that means for editing and version history.
5. In DATA, enter the request body below, typing your own application code directly:

{
  "application": "<your application code>",
  "user_id": "{{device:user_id}}",
  "source": "journey",
  "flight": {
    "carrier": "",
    "flight_number": "",
    "flight_date": "",
    "departure_airport": ""
  }
}

6. For each of the four empty flight values, open DATA BUILDER.
7. Select category Event.
8. Pick the matching attribute from your booking event (carrier, flight number, flight date, departure airport).
9. Copy the macro Pushwoosh generates and paste it in as that field’s value. Repeat for the remaining three values.

Vorsicht

The response echoes back flight_key, which matches the attribute you already put on the booking event, so there’s nothing to map from it. A failed subscribe call drops the passenger from the journey at this step instead, the same as any Webhook step: that passenger never gets watched, and won’t receive any of the alerts further down the journey. See What happens when a request fails.

Wait for a status update

Add a Wait for Trigger step after the Webhook step.

1. Add one branch and set its event to PW_FlightStatusChanged.
2. Under multi-session attribute matching, select the same flight-key attribute you used on the entry. This makes sure a status update only wakes the passenger whose flight it’s actually about.
3. Set the waiting period to comfortably cover the flight. 48 hours is enough for most itineraries.
4. Leave the Not triggered branch without a next step. A passenger whose flight produces no matching update before the wait expires isn’t an error case, so ending here quietly is normal, though you can add a fallback message instead if you’d rather.

Branch by event type

Add a Condition split after the Wait for Trigger step.

1. Select Event as the condition type.
2. In Event from Journey, choose PW_FlightStatusChanged.
3. Under Attribute, select event_type.
4. Set the condition to is.
5. Add a branch with the value gate_change.
6. Click Save. This creates two branches: the one you named for a gate change, and All other users for every other event type.

Repeat this element, or add more branches to it, for the other event_type values you want to act on: delay, boarding, departed, arrived, cancelled, and baggage_ready all work the same way.

Notify the passenger

Add a Push element on the gate-change branch.

1. Select or create a push preset.
2. Set Message type to Transactional message, since a flight status alert is a service notification, not a promo. Frequency capping doesn’t apply, and it still reaches passengers in a control group.
3. Enable personalization with event attributes.
4. Choose PW_FlightStatusChanged as the source event.
5. Fill your preset’s placeholders from flight_number and gate_new.

PW_FlightStatusChanged event reference

Every change the integration detects is delivered as one PW_FlightStatusChanged event, with all attributes always present: empty ones are sent as blank values, never left out.

Attribute	Type	Description
event_type	String	What changed (see the values below)
flight_key	String	The same flight key you set on the booking event
flight_number	String	The flight number
departure_airport	String	Departure airport code
arrival_airport	String	Arrival airport code
status	String	Current flight status (see the values below)
gate_old / gate_new	String	Departure gate before and after the change
terminal_old / terminal_new	String	Departure terminal before and after the change
baggage_claim	String	Baggage belt number, once assigned
provider	String	The data provider that reported the change (aerodatabox)
delay_minutes	Integer	Minutes of delay, present once a flight is delayed by 5 minutes or more
scheduled_at / estimated_at / actual_at	String	Scheduled, currently estimated, and actual times, in the provider’s own format
flight_date / event_time	Date	The flight’s date, and when the change happened

Hinweis

scheduled_at, estimated_at, and actual_at are String attributes, not Date, because a flight without a revised time still has to keep the other two. A Date attribute is dropped from the event entirely when its value is empty. Use flight_date and event_time for anything you need to filter as a date.

event_type values: gate_change, delay, boarding, departed, arrived, cancelled, baggage_ready.

status values: scheduled, check_in, boarding, departed, delayed, arrived, cancelled, diverted, unknown. An AeroDataBox status Pushwoosh doesn’t recognize is reported as unknown rather than guessed.