Daniel - July 21, 2021
In this article, I’ll show you how to scrape data from the Booking.com website.
When you use a bad proxy, you’re increasing the chances of your true IP getting blocked instead of reducing it. This is why only the best proxies are recommended for scraping booking.com. You can purchase the best proxies for booking.com scraping from a reliable proxy provider like ProxyRack.
Here are the available proxy options to choose from;
Residential Proxies
Unmetered Residential Proxies: Starting from $80
Premium GEO Residential Proxies: Starting from $14.95
Private Residential Proxies: Starting from $99.95
Datacenter Proxies
USA Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Mixed Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Shared Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $49
Canada Rotating Proxies: Starting at $65
The website, www.booking.com, was launched in 1996 in Enschede, Netherlands. It’s owned by Booking Holdings and offers services to people from all over the world. On this website, you can book hotels, flights, cars, airport taxis, and more. Generally, you can book almost any service you need while travelling or going on vacation.
The website is simple to use. From the homepage, you use the aggregator to search for an ideal service. You simply need to set your location, check-in and check-out date, and how many people you’re traveling with. Finally, you choose your purpose of travelling.
In less than 3 seconds, you’ll get a list of all available travel services that meet your search criteria. You can sort the result according to prove or secondary services and facilities you’re interested in. You’ll get detailed information about every service provider on the result list. From the Booking.com website, you can reserve your booking.
Booking.com is considered one of the best travel agency and lodging reservation aggregator websites. The website boasts of more than 28 million listings and as a global website, it’s available in 43 different languages.
Why would anyone want to scrape Booking.com? It’s simple; to get listing information about hotels, car rentals, flights, etc. Let’s assume you want to know the best hotels in a particular region, you can scrape hotel listings data from the particular on Booking.com. As a renowned aggregator, the data you get is highly trusted.
Scraping the Booking.com website requires a web scraping bot. A web scraping bot is simply an automated program designed to extract data from websites. It works hand-in-hand with a web crawler. The web crawler finds the data on the website and the web scraper extracts it.
Without a web scraping bot, you’ll be left to manually copy and paste data from the booking.com website which is not only stressful but will also take a chunk of your time. Fortunately, many good booking.com scraping bots are available for you to use. However, a good scraping bot alone won’t do the job efficiently. Another thing you need is a proxy.
Your web scraping bot is a threat to websites. Once a website detects that you’re trying to access its data with a bot, the website will block your IP address, restricting access. This is likely when you want to scrape data from Booking.com.
Websites are against bots because cyber criminals and hackers also use automated programs to carry out their illicit acts. A website cannot tell the intention of the bot operator so the anti-bot system simply blocks all bot traffic. With a proxy, you can prevent this from happening.
Proxies send and receive requests from web servers on your behalf. When you use a proxy, your computer (or bot in this case), is hidden from the website (booking.com) that you’re trying to access. This is done by IP masking. Your true IP is replaced with one from the proxy.
The difference is that proxies don’t come with just one IP. They come with thousands and millions of them. Hence, you can rotate these proxies so that they don’t get blocked. It’s that simple; before a website will detect that one IP is a bot, you must have switched to another and so on.
With a good proxy and a reliable web scraper, you can scrape data off booking.com efficiently.