How to Utilize Web Scraping for Hotel Prices: Complete Guide

The world is slowly recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic consequences. Unfortunately, one industry that got more affected by the pandemic is traveling. 

As the situation gets better, the government is taking over the restrictions. People are planning to get back to their routines, travel,  work, and have an everyday life as we always used to have before the pandemic. 

The traveling industry is getting back as people are tired of being in their homes. One of the problems hotel and accommodation authorities find is attracting more customers. It is because they also have to keep in mind the affordability factor of the hotel services.

While booking tickets, you will see different platforms offering hotel services at different prices. Then how do these hotels decide their price? Well, the answer to this question is web scraping. Yes, these hotels scrape prices of other hotels from various platforms and then decide the best price they can offer their customers.

What is the Pricing Strategy in Hotel Industry?

There are many ways to decide the hotel’s price, like competitive pricing, availability, and the demand. Moreover, discounts for booking in advance and dynamic prices for the festival should also be taken into consideration.

So, hotels need to consider the costs of service their competitors are using, the number of rooms available, and the demand for the hotel’s services. Without these considerations, they cannot decide on a price that gives them profit.

Apart from these factors, the pricing of the hotel services also depends on dynamic factors like holiday seasons. During holidays, the demand for services is high, so the hotel’s price increases. 

And in times when there is low demand, the hotel authorities try to provide discounts and other rewards for attracting travelers. Thus, the demand and the supply of the service only helps hotel authorities to decide their price.

Moreover, whenever you enter a hotel, they collect your data to understand your customer behavior. At times, they also ask for your feedback. This data helps them make decisions and decide their profit. Based on your review, they also make amendments in their service and pricing.

Another thing that these hotels do to decide their price is to observe what their competitors are doing. They keep a constant check on the price of other hotels and only then decide their price. 

To do this, they use a web scraping process. Hence, we can say that the process used to scrape hotel prices is known as web scraping hotel prices.

How to Use Price Scraping for Hotels?

In the case of hotel price scraping, we collect the data from various websites like Trivago, TripAdvisor, Kayak, and others to compare all the factors like price, amenities, etc.

Scraping hotel prices is a vital part of the hotel business as it provides them with all the data required to make decisions. While doing this, the best customer experience is always taken care of. 

Unfortunately, many hotel owners find it hard to price their hotels based on the market demands. So, they either end up pricing very high, which results in loss-making business. Or, they end up pricing low compared to the market and hence lose out on the profit. 

The hotel price scraping tools can be at the rescue in such cases. Hotel price scarpers like ProWebScraper can help you collect data from various websites and help you decide the right price for the hotel rooms and services. 

You can also use the data to price the hotels and your services based on changing seasons. This changing price is known as dynamic pricing. In dynamic pricing, the service price keeps on fluctuating based on the demands of the service. 

Even though these prices change very fast, web scraping tools provide accurate costs and help to attract more customers.

Why is hotel price scraping necessary for the hotel business?

Scraping hotel prices is necessary for the hotel business as it helps you collect data and understand the trends in the hotel industry in real-time. You can use the data collected from web scrapers like ProWebScraper to decide hotel services pricing.

Hence, it becomes mandatory for you as a hotel authority to use web scraping to decide the correct prices for your services as per market-value.

Challenges in scraping hotel prices

While scraping hotel prices might seem so helpful for business, there are many places where this price scraping method might fail to live up to its standards. 

Also, there are a few challenges that business owners might face while using hotel price scraping tools for making decisions.

1. Anti-scraping Techniques used by many hotel portals

Many Online travel agency platforms [OTA]  don’t want their data to be open for the scrapers to use. These platforms use different anti-scraping techniques to prevent scrapers from collecting their data. 

The platforms like Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Trivago, Kayak, Expedia use such methods to control the data on their website. 

They use different anti-scraping techniques that can identify the web scrapers and restrict them from accessing their website. If this happens, a web scraping tool will not be able to scrape any data from that specific website.

2. Scaling

To know about your competitors, you may need to scrape over a hundred or thousand websites. Doing this one by one will become a time-consuming process, and you will not be able to focus on your other tasks then. 

And when you’re scraping data, you have to maintain your anonymity. To maintain your anonymity, you’ll need highlighly anonymous proxies. 

A small scale service provider or scraping data as an individual might not have enough proxies or resources to scrape the data in large scale. 

So, what will you do if the target websites restrict your access? Do you have a robust proxy management infrastructure that can maintain your anonymity? Well, this is a major challenge in the case of web scraping. 

3. Scraper setup & Maintenance

Let’s take an example here. If you and your friend are doing any research, you both will have a different format to collect a participant’s data. Similarly, different websites also have different interfaces to store their data. It gets difficult for web scrapers to locate the data in such cases. And so, for every different interface, you will have to set up a different scraper that can collect data from that particular format or interface only. 

It, in turn, increases the setup cost of the scrapers for different websites for the hotel authorities. The hotel price scraper will have to be trained to understand the website’s interface. Only then it can collect the data by web scraping hotel prices.

The travel websites also update their interface for a better user experience. In such a case, you will have to update the price scraper every time the website’s interface changes to scrape the hotel prices. It then adds up the cost of Maintenance of the scraper. 

How to Scrape Hotel Prices?

At first, scraping hotel prices might seem to be a significant and complex task. However, tools like ProWebScraper can come handy to make the process more effective. ProWebScraper helps you collect structured hotel data from various sites.

ProWebScraper has an easy-to-use interface for scraping any website. It does not need technical knowledge in dealing with the data. You can decide the points to keep focused on while scraping the data. 

Here we will user ProWebScraper to scrape hotel name, the ratings, reviews, pricing, discounts offered, etc. from tripadvisor.com. 

Let’s start scraping hotel data by following the simple steps below:

1. Create a free account

Visit to create your free account for web scraping hotel prices. After creating your free account, log in to ProWebScraper with your details.

2. Create and Configure scraper 

To collect the data of a website like TripAdvisor, add the website’s link in the ProWebScraper. 

Once the data of the website loads, select all the data points or parameters you want to highlight. 

After selecting the data points, Save the scraper. Finally, click the “Save” button to save your scraper.

3. Downloading Your Data in CSV or JSON

Your data will be available for download in JSON or CSV format in the Scraper dashboard when you finish the scraper. 

4. Automating the scraping process

To automate your scraping process, use the scheduler provided on the website to decide the interval after which it will scrap the data again automatically.

Now, your whole scraper is set up for scraping hotel prices and producing results for you on the interval you have decided. Scraping hotel prices in this way will help you extract hotel data of all the similar hotels to your business.

Conclusion

Hotels are increasingly investing in strong data analytics. If that proves to be too expensive for you to handle on your own, opt for the third-party service providers. 

Do you want to monitor your competitor’s hotel pricing data?  Visit the ProWebScraper today for scraping hotel prices for your business. Create your free account on the website to get 100 pages of data. The team of ProWebScraper will always be at your service if you find any difficulty. Get in touch with the experts and scale your business using data to your advantage.