The Organization is a leader in hospitality and travel technology solutions, assisting to airlines, hotels, cruise lines, car rental companies, and online travel agents to optimize their business processes and maximize their business.
KEY BUSINESS CHALLENGES
The organization had no answer to overcome the key business challenge in terms of sourcing the travel data from Ctrip Mobile App in real time scenario.
Typical Business Requirement was to scrape Ctrip hotel pricing data in real time using a REST API calls, rather than a sequential extraction.
urthermore, their business requirement requires them to serve the request in real time only i.e. Scrape Ctrip Pricing data using API.
Key challenges faced were as mentioned below,
- Scrape the data from Ctrip Mobile App in real-time.
- Serve around 200k – 800k request on daily basis.
- Take the real time screenshots of the mobile app.
- Get hotel pricing data in accordance with their specified criteria.
ROBUST SOLUTION
Scalable Solution has been built to accept thousands of requests in real time containing Hotel ID as an input; mapping the Hotel ID with Hotel Name; extracting the lowest fare of Room Type corresponding to targeted Hotel along with other associated information from Ctrip Mobile App; encapsulating the extracted details into JSON; and deliver the JSON back to the client premise.
Solution has been equipped with Strong infrastructure including high end Servers, embedded Chinese Captcha resolution services, regional proxies, and Automated QA algorithms.
Automatic Email alerts have also been configured to acknowledge the No. of request has been served successfully during the specified period of time along with No. of fail request with defined error code.
Mobile App Scraping from Ctrip is the perfect solution to assist Travel Industry in the various ways.
- Powerful REST API to serve multiple requests in parallel and send the response back in JSON.
- Serve around 800k request on a daily basis.
- Take the screen shot in real time from Ctrip Mobile App.
- Flexibility to expand the infrastructure to serve the increased number of request.
- Extract more than 30 data fields based on request received and deliver in JSON format.
- Consistent solution that serves the live request 24 X 7 to deliver the required JSON data.
- Automated QA reports at regular interval to track all the request received and response sent.
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.
SOLUTION RESULTS
Robust Ctrip Mobile APP Scraping API has enable organization to focus more on their daily core operational functions by associating with X-Byte. The major aspects that have optimized their businesses are as mentioned below,
- Automated System to serve the daily flow of all travel request.
- Screenshot capturing that helped to validate the travel data.
- Automated QA process that have minimized the internal QA resources.
