Crawling Hotel Prices Using Pricing Optimization

Success Story -

The travel and hotel sector is constantly evolving, with exabytes of information getting updated regularly, if not hourly. It is used to be difficult to keep track of and manage hotel listings across many platforms, but that is no longer the case thanks to technology.

Web scraping hotel rates can provide daily price data, allowing you to automate and enhance your hotel performance matching process. With the entire world wide web operating as a repository, access to reliable and meaningful information at the correct moment becomes critical for enterprises operating in the dynamic travel industry.

Here is one example showing one such requirement that we successfully fulfilled.

Client Profile

The hotel pricing of a well-known Indian budget hotel chain had to be updated twice a day. The client required daily pricing data from themselves and their competitors and was looking for a web scraping service provider to assist them.

Required Hotel Information

The client provided us with specific requirements:

They will mention the check-in and check-out dates. These files will be posted to a file-sharing server, and our web scraping software will be ready to take them up and process them at a predetermined time.

Web crawl frequency was twice a day, and fields for extraction were predetermined and in a specific order as requested by the client.

The data crawled on a given day must be completed and delivered by 2359 hours the following day. Hotel costs must be received in INR exclusively.

Inventory Crawls of hotel information will be conducted out twice a month to keep the database up to date.

This information was utilized to locate additional hotels in the area and form strategic partnerships with them to expand the network throughout the country.

Approximate Monthly Data Volumes and Target Sites

The majority of India's leading OTAs (Online Travel Agents) with a monthly volume of over 30 million records. Depending on the files submitted by the client, around 300,000 to 400,000 records were delivered per site every day.

Web Scraping Hotel Rates

We designed the crawlers to search for the files on the hosting server at a pre-determined time and pick them up if they were available. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon, the crawler would look for files.

To ensure data transmission before 2359 hours of a given day, more scripts were built and additional resources were used.

The crawlers were set up to determine whether the currency was in Indian rupees. The crawlers were designed to alter the amount into INR if it wasn't INR. When servers from all around the globe were used to crawl the data.

Advantages of Scraping Hotel Prices

As needed, frequent and customizable access to the required data. With a team dedicated to the client-side who were directly involved with this activity, they were able to save roughly 23% on costs.

They had access to updated data on a biweekly basis (fortnightly) and were in a stronger position to expand their presence across the nation with a bi-monthly inventory crawl.

They were able to save around 23% on expenditures thanks to a dedicated crew on the client end who were actively involved with this activity.

They had biweekly (fortnightly) access to updated data and were in a better position to spread their footprint across the country with a biweekly product crawl.

Because the search engine only collects data if it is accessible, the client has the option of only uploading files as needed.

Conclusion:

While the implementation of such a use case was difficult, once it was done, the client was able to effectively use the retrieved information to improve their promotional pricing strategy.