This case study shows how X-Byte Enterprise Crawling has fulfilled the requirements of an Indian client, who wanted web scraping hotel prices on a daily basis.
MATCH & MONITOR HOTEL LISTINGS THROUGH WEB SCRAPING HOTEL PRICES
The Travel & Hotel industry is changing with additional bytes of data getting updated on a daily or hourly, basis. Managing and monitoring the hotels’ listings across different platforms might be tedious, however, not with the technology.
Extracting hotel prices could deliver pricing data daily, helping you automate and optimize the hotel pricing matching procedure.
For businesses working in today’s travel industry, having the entire World Wide Web working as the database, access for accurate and well-structured data at right time has so much importance. Let’s see the use cases of such requirements, which we have supported recently.
Client
A famous budget hotel chain of India needed to update hotel prices two times a day. The client required their and competitors’ price data daily as well as are searching for the web data scraping service provider for helping them scrape the data.
Client’s Requirements
This client had a particular set of requests:
- Check-in and Check-out dates to get identified by them
- Data crawled in any particular day needs to get completed as well as supplied before 2359 hrs.’ on the same day
- Different fields for scraping were pre-defined as well as in the set order stated by the customer
- Hotel information to get two times a month for updates
- Hotels pricing to get received in the INR only
- The data was to get uploaded into the file-sharing server as well as our crawlers were picking them at predefined times as well as processing them
- Web crawling frequency was two times a day
The data was getting used for strategically identifying newer hotels in this region to cooperate with them for increasing the network in the country.
TARGETED SITES AND ESTIMATED MONTHLY DATA VOLUMES
The majority of key OTAs (Online Travel Agents) within India has a volume of about 30 million records every month. Around 300,000 to 400,000 records for every site per day got delivered depending on uploaded files by this client.
Scrape Hotel Prices for Consistent Data
We have programmed the scrapers to search the files on sharing server at the pre-decided time as well as choose them if accessible. The crawler might check for the files in the morning as well as in the afternoon.
Extra scripts were written as well as extra resources were used to make sure that data delivery takes place before 2359 hrs.’ on a particular day
The crawlers were well-programmed for finding if the currency was INR. Unless INR, the crawlers got programmed for changing the currency into INR. It was very important when the servers from around the world were getting used to crawling the data.
Also, the crawlers were programmed for making sure not to hit targeted servers extremely aggressively for avoiding getting blocked whereas, at the same time, making sure that all the required data got seized before 2359 hrs.
X-BYTE SOLUTION
Setting up the Crawler – The crawler was initially configured such that it could automatically scrape product price and essential data fields for present categories on a daily basis.
Data Template : A template was created utilizing data structuring based on the schema provided by the customer.
Delivery of Data : Without any manual input from either side, the closing data was supplied in an XML format through Data API regularly.
The dataset had all the information including comments, news timelines, most viewed articles, customer behaviour, etc. All of the scraped data was indexed using hosted indexing components, and search APIs were made available so that a client could get the results every few minutes.
ADVANTAGES PROVIDED BY EXTRACTING HOTEL PRICES
- Apart from the early onboarding period, the procedure was completely automatic. Any disruption with the service was automatically updated for the support team for making sure that crawls run smoothly.
- Having a bi-monthly inventory crawling, they had access to updated data frequently (fortnightly) as well as were in the superior position of increasing their footprints across the country.
- Having a lower turnaround time, the data scraped might get used more efficiently.
- Regular as well as flexible access to the necessary data as per requirement. As the web crawler chooses data if accessible, the customer had the suppleness of uploading the files if needed.
- Seeing a devoted team at the customer’s side that was directly associated with the activity, the cost saving of around 23% was attained by them.
Result
Well-organized Hotel Price Monitoring and Matching
As the setup was a stimulating aspect of the use cases, one applies, the customer has been successfully utilizing the scraped data for improving their prices and their promotion strategies.
