Are you looking for a way to scrape Booking.com data? It might interest you to know that regardless of your coding skills, there is an option available to you. Read the article below to discover the best Booking scraper in the market – and learn how to develop yours if you are a coder.
The Booking.com website is one of the most popular destinations for travelers and tourists looking to book a room, flight, and even rent a car. One thing you will come to like is the numerous options made available to you by Booking. But all of these are only important to Booking real users.
If you are interested in collecting data from the Booking website, then what matters to you is the available data you can collect and being one of the most popular in its space, there is an enormous amount of data you can collect ranging from hotel accommodations, flight fare, car rental service, and their associated details such as pricing, and much more.
However, while there is an enormous amount of data you can extract from the Booking website, doing so is not easy. Bookings do not provide an easy way in the form of an API for interested persons to collect data from its platform. This means that if you want to extract data from its platform, you will have to do that on your own, and for it to be done efficiently, it will have to be done in an automated manner using a bot – a process known as web scraping.
In this article, we would be showing you how to scrape data from Booking either by developing your own custom Booking scraper or by recommending some of the best Booking scrapers for you to use – especially for non-coder.
Booking Scraping – an Overview
Before we move deep into the article, you need to know that Booking does not support scraping data from its platform, and its anti-spam system has been built in such a way that it discourages such by blocking requests coming from an IP that seems to be accessing its platform in an automated fashion.
One thing you need to know is that because of the value of the content on its platform, a lot of price comparison websites have made it a target. This has made Bookings tighten and invest in its anti-scraping systems. This means that if you must scrape it on any reasonable scale, you will need to incorporate techniques to bypass its anti-spam system; else, you will be blocked after a few attempts.
The Booking platform tracks your activities using the IP address and cookies at the very least. While it does this to provide you a better user experience, it also uses it to prevent spam, such as automated access as web scrapers do. One of the most important techniques you must use is to use proxies that will provide you alternative IP addresses so that your requests would not have the same footprints, making it difficult for Booking to trace the requests to one device.
You will also need to rotate user agent and other headers, incorporate a Captcha solver, and follow the scraping best practices such as setting delays between requests as a way of being nice.
How to Scrape Booking.com Using Python, Requests, and BeautifulSoup
This section has been written for those with coding skills. If you do not know how to code, you are advised to go to the next section for recommendations on the best already-made scrapers you can use to scrape Booking. In this section, we would be describing how Booking scrapers are developed using Python and its associated libraries (Requests and BeautifulSoup).
One thing you will come to like about Booking is that you can access it even with JavaScript execution turned off. This means that you can use the Requests and BeautifulSoup libraries to scrape it. It also means that you can evade all of the JavaScript-dependent anti-spam systems designed to make scraping difficult.
With the Requests library, you are able to send HTTP requests, including POST and GET, among others. When you get the content of the page you want to scrape data from, you can then make use of the BeautifulSoup library for parsing out the required data. In terms of tools for a basic Booking scraper, that is all you need.
However, for scraping at any reasonable scale, you will need to integrate rotating proxies so that your requests would be routed via proxy servers, giving each of your requests a unique IP footprint.
I would recommend you make use of residential proxies from either Bright Data or Smartproxy.
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Code Sample for Scraping Booking
The above are all theories and would not make sense without showing you in practice a script with which you can use to scrape Booking. Below would be a small script that accepts a list of hotel accommodation URLs and return the details for each. It is quite a basic tool, and as such, we would not be incorporating proxies and other detection evasions techniques such as Captchas and user-agent rotation. We would also not be handling exceptions so that you will get a clear understand of how to use Requests and BeautifulSoup to scrap Booking.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
class BookingScraper:
def__init__(self):
self.hotel_list = []
self.hotel_info = {}
self.hotel_info["name"] = "NA"
self.hotel_info["address"] = "NA"
self.hotel_info["description"] = "NA"
defget_hotel_info(self, url):
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9'}
page_source = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page_source.content, "html.parser")
self.hotel_info["name"] = soup.find("h2", {"class": "hp__hotel-name"}).text
self.hotel_info["address"] = soup.find("span", {"class": "hp_address_subtitle"}).text
self.hotel_info["description"] = soup.find("div", {"class": "hp_desc_main_content "}).text
self.hotel_list.append(self.hotel_info)
urls = ["https://www.booking.com/hotel/ng/dilida-guest-suites.html",]
hotel_infos = BookingScraper()
for urlin urls:
hotel_infos.get_hotel_info(url)
print(hotel_infos.hotel_list)
Best Booking Scrapers in the Market
Looking at the above, you will think you need coding skills to scrape Booking. But in reality, you can get that done even without writing a single line of code. And interestingly, some developers even avoid developing their own web scraper but use an already-made one instead.
These already-made scrapers have been designed to be used by non-coders. For this reason, they have been made to be quite easy to use. While some require you to configure proxies, others do so on your behalf. Generally, most of the good web scrapers you can use to scrap.
Booking Data Collector
- Pricing: Starts at $500 for 151K page loads
- Free Trials: Available
- Data Output Format: Excel
- Supported Platforms: Web-based
The Data Collector tool is owned and developed by Bright Data, a leader in the proxy market. This tool can be regarded as one of the best Booking scrapers in the market. It is available for use as a web-based tool.
All you need to use this tool is to have your account loaded with funds, log into the user dashboard and access it from the Data Collector tab. With this tool, you can collect data on any hotel available on the Booking website.
One thing you will come to like about Data Collector is that it has a pre-collected dataset of all of the hotels on Booking, which you can just get and use. Pricing is based on the number of page loads. However, you will need to fund your account first.
Octoparse
- 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
The Octoparse scraping tool is another web scraper you can use to collect any data you want to collect from the Booking website. One thing you will need to know about Octoparse is that it has been developed to be undetectable, which makes it possible for you to collect any amount of data from the Bookings without getting blocked if you use the right proxies and use the tool the right way. Octoparse is a general web scraping tool that you can use to scrape any website, including Ajaxified websites – thanks to the fact that it has been developed for the modern web. Octoparse is quite easy to use, even for non-techies. It has support for scheduled scraping, among other advanced features.
ScrapeStorm
- 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 is one of the most advanced web scrapers out there that is available to those that do not have a skill in coding. With this tool, you can scrape all kinds of websites, including Booking.com, without getting blocked. This web scraper was developed by an ex-Google crawler team, and as such, they have got all the experience under their sleeve. One thing you will come to like about this tool once you start using it is its Artificial Intelligence (AI) based identification system that automatically detects data of interest on a page without any manual operation. However, it does have support for manually identifying data of interest yourself. It has the most extensive support for output data formats on the list.
ParseHub
- 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
If you visit the ParseHub scraping tool website, you will see that it makes it conspicuous that it is a free tool. However, it has both a free and paid tier, and even though the free tier can help you out, the advanced feature, including support for cloud-based scraping and schedule scraping, is only available for their paid plan. ParseHub is just like Octoparse and ScrapeStorm – they are all visual scraping tools that offer you a point and click interface for identifying your data of interest. ParseHub is quite easy to use, and you can start scraping Booking hotel data in no time. Aside from details of hotels, you can scrape any other data publicly available on Booking.com using ParseHub.
WebScraper.io Extension
- Pricing: Freemium
- Free Trials: Freemium
- Data Output Format: CSV, XLSX, and JSON
- Supported Platform: Browser extension (Chrome and Firefox)
Last on the list of recommended Booking scrapers is the WebScraper.io browser extension. The WebScraper.io browser extension is available for both Chrome and Firefox browsers. This web scraper is a free tool you can use – you only need to provide proxies, and we recommend you use rotating proxies from Bright Data or Smartproxy.
The tool offers you a point and click interface to configure it and identify data of interest with which you can scrape all kinds of websites, including Ajaxified websites. This tool is available right in your browser, and you can scrape hotels by categories, take care of pagination, among others. It comes with a modular selector, making it easier for you.
Conclusion
As a way of concluding this article, I would like to suggest to you that you should follow the best practices involved in web scraping. One of which is to be nice to websites you scrape to avoid overwhelming their servers.
While Booking.com is a big platform and your activities might not affect their servers, it is also right to be nice. If possible, you can carry out your scraping task at night when traffic is low.
