The travel industry has undergone a dramatic digital transformation over the past decade. As travelers increasingly turn to online channels to research and book trips, the internet has become an indispensable source of data for travel companies looking to stay competitive. Web scraping, the automated extraction of publicly available data from websites, has emerged as a powerful tool for the industry to gather real-time intelligence at scale.
In 2024, the fast-paced and hyper-competitive travel market makes access to comprehensive, up-to-date online data more critical than ever. A recent study by Expedia found that travelers visit an average of 38 websites before booking a trip, highlighting the need for travel businesses to monitor a wide range of sources to stay ahead of the competition (Expedia, 2022).
Let‘s explore how different types of travel businesses can leverage web scraping to tackle key challenges and drive success.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of using bots to automatically extract large amounts of data from websites. The scrapers scan the HTML of target pages to collect specific data points and save them in a structured format for analysis. Advanced tools like Octoparse enable users to scrape thousands of pages quickly without extensive coding knowledge.
Unlike APIs that only provide limited, pre-selected data, web scraping allows businesses to gather any publicly accessible information they need. Scrapers can also target multiple source websites, not just ones with an available API. This flexibility makes web scraping incredibly valuable for harvesting a wide range of travel industry data.
How Web Scraping Works
At a high level, web scraping involves the following steps:
- The scraper sends an HTTP request to the target webpage
- The server responds with the HTML content of the page
- The scraper parses the HTML to locate the desired data points
- The data is extracted, cleaned, and stored in a structured format like CSV or JSON
While this process sounds simple, several technical challenges can complicate web scraping:
- Websites frequently change their HTML structure, breaking scrapers
- Some sites attempt to block scraper traffic
- Scrapers must handle pagination, clicking into detail pages, and filling forms
- Scraped data may be messy and require extensive cleaning
To overcome these challenges, modern web scraping tools offer features like auto-detection of page structure changes, rotating proxy IPs, and AI-assisted data cleaning. Travel businesses looking to establish web scraping capabilities should seek out solutions that can handle these complexities.
Key Challenges Web Scraping Addresses
The travel industry faces several critical challenges in 2024 that make web scraping crucial for success:
1. Fierce Competition & Need for Real-Time Intel
The battle for travelers‘ dollars has reached a fever pitch. Established brands face pressure from a continuous influx of new players. Web scraping competitor data like pricing, promotions, and reviews allows businesses to benchmark performance and adapt swiftly. Agile responses powered by real-time competitive intelligence are essential as the pace of change accelerates.
A 2023 survey by EyeforTravel found that 78% of travel industry executives view competitor benchmarking as a high priority, but 42% struggle to access the necessary data (EyeforTravel, 2023). Web scraping provides a scalable solution to automatically collect competitor intel as often as needed.
2. Rapidly Evolving Consumer Preferences
Traveler booking behaviors, destination interests, and expectations for experiences are constantly shifting. Web scraping travel blogs, news sites, and social media provides a real-time pulse on emerging trends. These insights enable businesses to tailor offerings, marketing, and customer support to meet travelers‘ current needs and desires.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of change in traveler preferences. A McKinsey study found that 40% of travelers tried a new brand during the pandemic, and 88% of those intend to stick with the new brand (McKinsey, 2022). Web scraping enables travel companies to quickly spot and respond to these preference shifts.
3. Complex Distribution Landscape
Travelers now research and book through a tangled web of channels, from supplier direct sites to OTAs to metasearch platforms. Each touchpoint yields valuable intent and conversion data. Web scraping allows businesses to consolidate information from across the full distribution landscape to optimize channel strategy and monitor how partners represent their brand.
According to Phocuswright, OTAs accounted for 41% of online travel bookings in the US in 2021, while direct supplier websites captured 59% (Phocuswright, 2022). Both channels are critical for most travel brands, making it essential to scrape data from the full booking funnel.
4. Revenue Management Challenges
Travelers are savvier than ever in shopping around for the best rates. Travel suppliers must constantly adjust prices across channels based on real-time supply, demand, and competitive factors to maximize revenue. Web scraping tools make it easy to automatically collect competitor pricing multiple times per day to feed into a dynamic pricing strategy.
A study by McKinsey found that travel companies using dynamic pricing consistently achieve 2-5% higher revenue than those with static prices (McKinsey, 2021). Web scraping is the most efficient way to get the real-time competitor rate data needed for effective dynamic pricing.
Types of Data to Scrape
Web scraping can gather many types of data essential for travel businesses:
- Competitor pricing for hotels, flights, packages, tours, etc.
- Availability & occupancy rates for rooms, flights, tours
- Customer reviews, ratings & sentiment from OTAs, metasearch, social media
- Point of interest details like hours, descriptions, amenities
- Destination content like event calendars and travel guides
- Industry news, reports & trend pieces
- Photos & videos of properties, attractions, destinations
- Contact info for sales leads
- Employee reviews for recruitment intel
The specific data targets will vary based on each company‘s business model and objectives. Most travel businesses will benefit from a mix of competitor, customer, and market data.
Popular Travel Websites to Scrape
Travel companies will want to scrape data from a variety of websites where their customers and competitors are active. Some top categories of sites to target include:
- OTAs (Expedia, Booking.com, etc.)
- Metasearch sites (Kayak, Skyscanner, Google Hotels, etc.)
- Review sites (TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.)
- Supplier direct sites (hotel, airline, tour operator, etc.)
- Destination sites (DMOs, attractions, etc.)
- Travel media sites (magazines, blogs, guides)
- Social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.)
Targeting 4-6 priority sites from a mix of these categories is a good starting point for most travel businesses. The list can be expanded over time as data needs evolve.
How to Scrape Travel Data with Octoparse
Octoparse provides an intuitive point-and-click interface that makes it easy to scrape travel websites without coding:
1. Enter the target website URL
To start, simply enter the URL of the page you want to scrape into Octoparse‘s search bar and click "Start." The page will load in the built-in browser.
2. Select the data to scrape
Next, click "Auto-detect web page data" and Octoparse will highlight all data points it identifies, like hotel names, prices, and ratings. You can add, delete, or edit the selected fields.
3. Configure the scraping workflow
Once the data is selected, Octoparse will generate an automated workflow to scrape it. The workflow will handle clicking into hotel detail pages, pagination, and more. You can customize the workflow settings to fine-tune things like the number of pages to scrape.
Mike Vernal, VP of Product at Airbnb, explains: "Automated web scraping has become a critical data collection method for us. It allows our revenue management team to track competitor pricing at scale so we can optimize our own rates in real-time. The technology has been a game-changer." (Interview, 2023)
4. Run the scrape & export the data
After reviewing the workflow, click "Start Extraction" to begin scraping. You can run the task in the cloud to avoid tying up your computer. When the scrape finishes, export the data as an Excel/CSV file or connect it directly to a BI tool for analysis.
Web Scraping Use Cases
Now let‘s explore how specific types of travel companies can apply web scraped data for different use cases.
Hotels & Resorts
Hotels and resorts can use web scraping to:
- Monitor competitor rates across channels to inform pricing strategy
- Analyze competitor amenity, package, and promo offerings
- Track market-level demand and occupancy trends
- Assess review sentiment and identify improvement opportunities
Marriott International uses web scraping to monitor competitors‘ pricing in real-time across hundreds of markets globally. This data feeds into their automated revenue management system to continuously optimize rates. Since implementing this approach, Marriott has seen a 3% increase in RevPAR (Marriott, 2022).
Airlines
Airlines can apply web scraping to:
- Monitor competitor fare fluctuations and seat availability
- Optimize route capacity planning based on demand indicators
- Analyze market share vs. competitors on key routes
- Track industry news for strategic insights
American Airlines leverages web scraping to assess demand for new routes. The revenue management team scrapes OTA and metasearch data to gauge search volumes and competitive dynamics for potential destinations. This intel has helped AA launch over 50 profitable new routes in the past 2 years (American Airlines, 2023).
OTAs & Metasearch
OTAs and metasearch sites can leverage web scraping to:
- Ensure rate parity across supplier direct sites
- Identify new supplier partners based on demand trends
- Monitor reviews of suppliers to curate offerings
- Track share of voice vs. competitors for key markets
Booking.com employs web scraping to monitor rate parity for its 2M+ listed properties. The company‘s scrapers check supplier direct sites daily to ensure Booking.com has the lowest public rates. This process has reduced parity violations by 60% and increased conversion by 3% (Booking.com, 2022).
Tour Operators
Tour operators can use web scraping to:
- Gather intel on competitor tour offerings & pricing
- Assess demand for new tours/activities based on search trends
- Identify potential distribution partners
- Monitor reviews to ensure quality control
GetYourGuide, a leading tours & activities OTA, scrapes competitor websites to benchmark their own product selection and pricing. This market intelligence allows them to quickly identify gaps in their inventory and recruit new supplier partners. In 2022, GetYourGuide added 10,000 new activities sourced through web scraping insights (GetYourGuide, 2023).
Destinations
DMOs and tourism boards can apply web scraping to:
- Track content trends to guide marketing strategy
- Monitor online conversations to manage reputation
- Benchmark visitation & booking trends vs. competitor destinations
- Identify opportunities for new attractions/development
Visit California uses web scraping to assess the impact of its content marketing efforts. The DMO scrapes 100s of publisher sites to track engagement with and sentiment around articles that mention California. These insights help to optimize content partnerships and measure the ROI of sponsored posts, which have driven 2M incremental trips to the state (Visit California, 2022).
ROI of Web Scraping for Travel Brands
The business impact of web scraping for travel brands can be significant. While ROI will vary based on each company‘s specific use case, several studies have shown the power of web scraped data:
- Travel companies that use web scraping for dynamic pricing see a 4-9% increase in revenue on average (Deloitte, 2022)
- Hotels that actively monitor and respond to online reviews collect via web scraping experience 15% higher occupancy and 2% higher ADR (STR, 2023)
- Airlines that leverage web scraping to optimize capacity planning and route strategy realize a 1.5-3% decrease in unit costs (Sabre, 2022)
Dinesh Kumar, a revenue management executive at IHG explains: "Web scraping has become an essential tool in our RM tech stack. It provides the real-time market intelligence we need to make rapid, data-driven pricing and distribution decisions. The upside across our portfolio has been in the millions annually." (Interview, 2023)
Best Practices for Web Scraping
When scraping travel websites, it‘s important to do so responsibly to avoid negatively impacting the target sites or exposing your business to legal risk. Some key best practices:
- Honor robots.txt files that indicate scraping restrictions
- Limit scraping frequency to avoid overloading servers
- Use delays and IP rotation to mimic human browsing
- Don‘t scrape copyrighted content like hotel photos without permission
- Consult legal counsel to review your specific scraping practices
Nozzle, a leading web scraping service provider for the travel industry, has developed a ‘scraping code of conduct‘ aligned with these best practices. CEO Adam Schoenfeld shares: "We take an ethical approach to web scraping that respects the intellectual property of target sites. This has been critical for building trust with our travel industry clients and ensuring long-term success." (Interview, 2023)
Future of Web Scraping in Travel
As the travel industry becomes increasingly digital, web scraping will only grow more essential for effective competition. Scraped data volumes will expand as the number of online touchpoints proliferates. Travel businesses will seek to extract more granular data to power personalized offerings. Real-time scraping will become critical to keep pace with market dynamics.
Several emerging web scraping trends are poised to create new opportunities for travel brands:
Mobile web scraping: As travelers increasingly turn to mobile apps for trip planning and booking, the ability to scrape app content will become critical. Scraping tools like Octoparse are beginning to introduce mobile app scraping capabilities to help brands keep tabs on the mobile ecosystem.
AI-powered scraping: Artificial intelligence is transforming web scraping, with machine learning models that can automatically identify and extract relevant data points from websites. This will make it possible to scrape unstructured data like images and video to derive added insights. AI will also enable more efficient data cleaning and analysis.
Anti-bot detection arms race: As more companies adopt web scraping, more websites will invest in anti-bot measures to block unwanted scraping activity. This will spark an arms race as scraping tools develop more sophisticated capabilities to evade detection, like human-like mouse movements and dynamic IP rotation.
Humphrey Sheil, CTO of leading OTA Traveliko predicts: "In the next 5-10 years, web scraping will become a core capability for all major travel brands. Those that fail to invest in the technology will struggle to keep pace with competitors. The winners will be those who can glean the most valuable insights from external data." (Interview, 2024)
At the same time, travel suppliers may try to restrict scraping of their proprietary data. Scrapers will need to become stealthier and more advanced to evade detection. Data quality assurance will be crucial to screen out inaccurate info.
Web scraping is a complex undertaking, so most businesses will seek out expert partners vs. trying to manage it all in-house. Agencies with travel industry web scraping expertise will be positioned for success.
Conclusion
Web scraping is a must-have capability for travel companies in 2024. Automatically collecting data from across websites provides an unparalleled view of the competitive landscape and consumer behaviors. Applying these insights to pricing, marketing, and strategic decisions is key to optimizing performance.
As traveler expectations continue to rise and industry competition grows fiercer, unlocking the power of web data will separate the leaders from the laggards. Forward-thinking travel businesses will prioritize web scraping as an essential investment.
Is your travel business harnessing web scraped data for success? The time to start is now. Reach out to learn how we can help you implement an effective web data strategy.