Rate Republic hostel price scraping

Rate Republic is an innovative, data-driven accommodation-marketing service. In order to maximize profit they price their accommodations from day to day based on different environmental aspects and competitors’ prices. Bits Studio joined the project in the automation of the collection of the competitors’ rates. Instead of the manual collection of the data - as was done previously - a regularly run, parameterizable scraping and querying solution was implemented for Rate Republic.

Dynamic

The application collects the current prices of numerous accommodations in multiple week timeframes from various websites. In the next iteration the query is shifted by one day to collect the data. The gathered prices and vacancy values are saved to a database, and a report is generated for Rate Republic in a format, that is the most convenient for them.

Flexible

The configuration of the system can be done through an easily editable text file, in which apart from the basic settings the number of daily runs, the scanned websites, and the list of filter criteria can be set. At the moment, 30 different area has filter criteria, and data is collected from 3 different websites 3 times per day. In case of scraping problems, or technical errors, the application sends an automatic e-mail to the users.

Deliberate attention was paid so that the amount of data collected be acceptable to the target website. When possible, data is collected from the endpoint of the website with one call, and even during a scraping approach the least number of calls are sent towards the target websites. The collection of data is always in accordance with the rules and regulations and without the infringement of the business interest of the affected websites.