Big online bus provider doesn’t want to partner with me and give me API. What should I do? Scrape their website?

[David]

I’m building a product that is data-driven from one of the biggest bus company services, mostly because they have very good deals and I personally use them every time I travel. The problem is that they don’t want to provide me API until I have traffic to the website. But here comes the problem of egg and basket, because product can’t exist without the data. So here is the question, how should I get that data? I can easily scrape it from their website, but there are 2 cons: I’m not sure how legal it is, and no referral links, so no revenue for me. How would you go in this case? I’m very curious how big flight/bus comparison web services started. Did they have partnerships with bus/flight providers from the very beginning? Or they scraped everything, and then got partnerships eventually? – by hq overview afonichkin – –