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Miscellaneous Web Scraping Software

Hotel: scrape prices, Q&A

 

Question

I want to extract the hotel name and the current room price of some hotels daily from https://www.expedia.ca/Hotel-Search?#&destination=Quebec,%20Quebec,%20Canada&startDate=06/11/2016&endDate=07/11/2016&regionId=&adults=2

I am a small hotel owner and want those info quite often, and hope I can do it with codes automatically in someway.  You are expert in this field, what is the easiest ways to get those information?  Can you give me some example codes?

Sincerely, Yinyan Guo

Answer

Yinyan, you’ve accessed the site which is the business directory. This site is a data aggregator, that allows server users to access data pages from its own db, which, in turn, might have been accumulated through scraping from online offers, aggregators…

So, scraping those is not simple; see the reasons:
  • Site developers protect their content from online copy.
  • Data amount is constantly changing and thus requires constant scrape for maintaining current/fresh info.
You do have some options:
  1. Custom scripting script.
  2. Use software or an online scraping service to scrape Expedia
  3. Use browser plugins to get data on demand since you want only “the current room price of some hotels daily“.

Option 1.  Scripting script

Hire a freelance programmer who will set up a scraping script along with a plugged-in proxy service; optionally he’ll set a DB to store extracted data. You may also inquire of us through our Contact us page.

Option 2. Scraping software

Go to WEB SCRAPING TOOLS AND SERVICES LANDSCAPE to choose any software meeting your scrape conditions. Most of them provide a trial period.
Note, you’d probably need to leverage proxies having a regular scrape, so consider those posts on proxies [for web crawlers].

Option 3. Plugin

Read about scraping plugins and this and try some of them. This might be the easiest way, providing you really need only limited info from single hotels. Plugins are good for retrieving small amounts of data on-demand; some may do it on a regular basis.

 

P. S. Yinyan, you may find free scrape codes provided by ScrapeHero useful. However, do not be naive in thinking that those codes will work from ground zero.

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