Airbnb Scraper 2022: How to Scrape Airbnb Data with Python

Airbnb scrapers are the tools for scraping the publicly available data on the Airbnb website. In the article below, we would be taking a look at some of the best Airbnb scrapers and how you can develop a custom one if you have coding skills.

Airbnb Scraper

With Airbnb, tourists and travelers can find vocational rentals, beach houses, cabins, and unique homes, around the world – this is a short description of what Airbnb is to the regular Internet user. For you as a web scraper, it means Airbnb can be your target for collecting accommodation rental data.

The Airbnb website has publicly available data that is useful for price comparison and monitoring, building recommendation systems for home rentals, and carrying out analysis, among other things. If you have chosen the Airbnb website s your target site for extracting data, then this article has been written for you as we would recommend some of the best web scrapers you can use to scrape Airbnb data.

Also to be discussed in this article is how you can develop your own custom web scraper to scrape Airbnb data. We used the term scraping because there is no official way to get it done. Airbnb does not provide an API with which you can scrape its content.

This means that you will have to find a way to get that done yourself if you must collect data from its platform. If you have coding skills, developing a custom one would not be a bad idea. For readers without coding skills, you can go straight to the section where we recommend Airbnb scrapers – inexperienced coders can also use them if they keep getting blocked.


Airbnb Scraping – an Overview

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Regardless of whether you want to make use of an already-made Airbnb scraper or you want to develop a custom one, you will benefit from reading the content of this section. Airbnb scraping is the process of using a web scraper to extract publicly available data from the Airbnb website.

This is more efficient, time-saving, and effective as a method of collecting data than doing it manually since Airbnb does not provide an API for collecting its data. One thing you need to know is that it also does not allow automated access and would not allow you to use a web scraper to collect its data. It has series of techniques it uses in making it unfriendly to web scrapers.

Airbnb tracks its users and can tell if certain actions are bot originating. This means that when developing a custom bot, you cannot overlook the fact that your bot would get blocked because it would if you do not incorporate techniques to evade the anti-spam check of the platform. Some of the anti-scraping techniques Airbnb has in place to discourage scraping, and other automated access includes IP tracking and blocking, browser fingerprinting, and as well as cookies tracking.

For you to succeed in scraping Airbnb, you must find ways to bypass all of these systems. If you are developing a custom bot for scraping Airbnb, then you must know how to bypass all of these. However, for those using already-made scrapers, it might not be necessary for you.


How to Scrape Airbnb Using Python and Selenium

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This section has been written for those with coding skills. Even though the programming language that would be used is Python, you can benefit from this section since the code is just a small fraction of the section, and you can use the knowledge acquired to develop a custom scraper in your favorite programming language.

If you are not a coder, you should move to the next section, where we provided recommendations on the best Airbnb scraper you can use without coding skills. As stated earlier, scraping Airbnb is not easy as it has anti-scraping techniques in place to block you from doing so.

If you take a look at the website, you will see that it is JavaScript-heavy. If you try turning JavaScript execution off in your browser, you won’t be able to access the content of interest to you as a scraper. So, scraping it using the popular Requests and BeautifulSoup would not work since Requests does not render JavaScript. Instead, you would have to make use of the Selenium Web Driver.

Selenium automates browsers, and you can use it to scrape data from Ajaxified websites. With Selenium, you can automate Chrome to open pages on the Airbnb website and then use its API to access the specific data from the page. To learn how to use Selenium with Python, read the Selenium documentation for Python here.

Selenium Web Driver Homepage

If you read the documentation highlighted above, you should be able to develop a web scraper for Airbnb. However, you won’t be able to use it to scrape data on a reasonable scale as you would be blocked after a few requests. To scrape Airbnb without getting blocked, you will need to bypass the anti-scraping system. You can do so by using proxies to bypass IP tracking and blocking. Airbnb can detect proxies, and as such, I would advise you to use residential proxies since they route requests via devices of regular Internet users, making them undetectable.

Bright Data, Smartproxy, and Shifter are some of the best providers of rotating residential proxies.

You also need to rotate values of request headers, set random delays between requests and have a captcha solver for solving Captcha if you will be scraping at a large scale.

  • Code Sample for Scraping Airbnb

Below is a sample script for scraping details of a listing on Airbnb. It takes a list of URLs of properties as an argument and returns the details of each property. The script is quite basic and only uses Python and Selenium. Chrome is the chosen browser. We did not handle the exception and did not incorporate proxies to make things easier for you to understand. Take this as an MVP.

from selenium import webdriver

class AirbnbScraper:

def__init__(self):
self.PATH = "chromedriver.exe"
self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(self.PATH)
self.hotel_list = []
self.hotel_info = {}
self.hotel_info["name"] = "NA"
self.hotel_info["about"] = "NA"
self.hotel_info["price"] = "NA"
self.hotel_info["verified"] = "NA"

defget_hotel_info(self, url):
self.driver.get(url)
# Parse data out of the page
self.hotel_info["name"] = self.driver.find_element_by_class_name("_fecoyn4").text
self.hotel_info["about"] = self.driver.find_element_by_class_name("plmw1e5")[0].find("span")
self.hotel_info["price"] = self.driver.find_element_by_class_name("_tyxjp1").text
#add hotel info to hotel list
self.hotel_list.append(self.hotel_info)

urls = ["https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/42577316",]
AirbnbScraper = AirbnbScraper()
for urlin urls:
AirbnbScraper.get_hotel_info(url)
print(AirbnbScraper.hotel_info)

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Best Airbnb Scrapers in the Market

It was in the past that you need coding skills to scrape content from the Internet. As it stands today, there are web scrapers that have been developed that you can use for scraping without writing a single line of code.

You can use some of these web scrapers to scrape data from the Airbnb website. Below are some of the best already-made web scrapers you can use to scrape from the Airbnb website. All except Apify are meant for non-coders.


Airbnb Data Collector

Bright Data - Luminati

  • Pricing: Starts at $500 for 151K page loads
  • Free Trials: Available
  • Data Output Format: Excel
  • Supported Platforms: Web-based

Data Collector of ScrapeAirbnb

The Data Collector service is one of the best web scrapers for Airbnb. It is a product of Bright Data which is a market leader in the proxy market. The Data Collector tool has got support for scraping a good number of social media and e-commerce platforms, including Airbnb. With this tool, you can get the price for a room effortlessly.

Airbnb Room Price

If you need to collect other data, you can contact the team to provide a collector for that. This tool is available as a web-based tool quite easy to use considering the fact that it has been designed to be used for non-techies. The major problem associated with it is that its minimum monetary commitment is quite expensive.


Apify Airbnb Scraper

Apify Logo

  • Pricing: Starts at $49 per month for 100 Actor compute units
  • Free Trials: Starter plan comes with 10 Actor compute units
  • Data Output Format: JSON
  • Supported OS: Cloud-based – accessed via API

Apify Airbnb Scraper Homepage

Apify is known for providing automation tools in the form of actors (bots). One of the actors which you can use to scrape the Airbnb data is the Airbnb Scraper developed by dtrungtin. With this tool, you can scrape data for all homes.

Aside from price, you can use it to scrape other information, including reviews. In terms of export format support, this tool has support for numerous export formats, including JSON, CSV, Excel, and XML. Unlike the general web scraper provided by Apify, this one is a paid tool.

However, it does allow you to make use of it for a while as a free trial before you are required to make a monetary commitment.Apify actors just like this one are meant only for NodeJS coders.


ScrapeStorm

Scrapestorm Logo

  • Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per month
  • Free Trials: Starter plan is free – comes with limitations
  • Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
  • Supported Platforms: Desktop, Cloud

ScrapeStorm Homepage

The ScrapeStorm scraper is arguably one of the best web scrapers in the market that you can use to scrape Airbnb. This is because it is quite smart, effective, and comes integrated with an AI system that makes it easy for it to identify data you would be interested in on Airbnb without any manual operation.

Interestingly, it does have support for manual operation should you be interested in other data on the page. This tool has got one of the best support for the data output format, and it does quite well as being undetectable and unblockable. This is because the team behind it is an experienced one haven worked in a Google crawler team in the past. The tool is a paid one.


ParseHub

Parsehub Logo

  • Pricing: Free with a paid plan
  • Free Trials: Free – advance features come at an extra cost
  • Data Output Format: Excel, JSON,
  • Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

Parsehub Homepage

ParseHub is one of the best Airbnb scrapers in the market. However, it is not developed as a specialized Airbnb scraper. It is a general web scraper that you can use to scrape Airbnb. One thing you will come to like about this service is that it has a free tier that you can use if you donot have a budget for a web scraper.

The tool is quite effective at scraping Airbnb as it has been developed for the modern web to which Airbnbbelongs. This tool does not require you to write a single line of code. Instead, it offers you a point-and-click interface to identify data of interest. ParseHub is quite easy to use, even for first-time users.


Octoparse

Octoparse Logo

  • Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
  • Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
  • Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, SQLServer
  • Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

Octoparse Overview

The Octoparse tool is a visual web scraper that has been designed for scraping websites using a point and click interface. This tool has proven to be effective at scraping Airbnb. It has systems in place to bypass the Airbnb anti-spam system, and when used correctly, you can scrape any amount of data from the website without having a fear of being blocked.

Octoparse is available as both an installable app on your PC as well as a cloud-based service. It has got support for scheduled scraping, which makes it possible for you to schedule your scraping tasks depending on your specific requirement. Aside from Airbnb, you can use Octoparse to scrape data from any other website.

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Conclusion

Looking at the above, you can see that not having access to an Airbnb is no longer an excuse, while you cannot scrape Airbnb for data of interest to you. This is because regardless of whether you have a skill in coding or not, there is a tool available for you to use.

In fact, one thing you will come to like about the list above is that there is a free alternative for you if you do not want to spend money. However, for that, you will still need to invest in high-quality rotating residential proxies from the likes of Bright Data and Smartproxy.

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