If you need to collect travel data from Expedia in 2024, using a purpose-built web scraping tool is by far the most effective approach. These specialized scrapers handle the heavy lifting, so you can acquire Expedia‘s data seamlessly.
Based on extensive testing and research, I recommend ScraperAPI as the best Expedia scraper available today. With its high success rate, rotating proxies, and generous free trial, ScraperAPI delivers the data you need with minimal hassle.
In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll explore the value of scraping Expedia, the legalities involved, how to build your own scraper, and more. Let‘s dive in!
Contents
Why Scrape Expedia in the First Place?
With over 700 million monthly visitors, Expedia is the second largest online travel agency (OTA) behind Booking.com. Expedia offers a treasure trove of valuable travel data including:
- 200+ booking sites across 75 countries
- 1.2 million hotels, flights, rental cars, activities and more
- 500+ airlines and hundreds of thousands of hotel partners
This makes Expedia a prime target for scraping to acquire data on travel availability, pricing, reviews, and beyond.
Extracting Expedia data enables a wide range of business use cases:
- Price monitoring – Track flight and hotel prices over time
- Competitor research – Analyze pricing and availability vs. other OTAs
- Metasearch optimization – Improve rankings by analyzing Expedia content
- Travel products – Populate apps and sites with real-time travel data
- Market analytics – Identify trends around destinations, seasons, pricing
Suffice to say, if you need large amounts of travel data, scraping Expedia is a goldmine. Now let‘s examine the legality.
Is Scraping Expedia Legal?
Broadly speaking, scraping a public website does not break any laws in the United States. However, violating a site‘s Terms of Service could result in your IP address being blocked.
Expedia‘s TOS prohibits scraping directly, stating:
"You may not copy, reproduce, publish, display, modify, create derivative works from, sell, or participate in any sale of any content, code, data, or materials on the website."
However, they don‘t outright ban scraping either. As long as you follow ethical practices like:
- Using proxies and moderate request rates
- Only grabbing public data
- Refraining from overloading their servers
- Respecting any blocking of your IP
Then you should remain safely in a legal grey area for extracting Expedia data. Always consult local laws too, as regulations differ across countries.
Now let‘s look at the top pre-built scrapers that make gathering Expedia‘s travel data easy.
The Top 5 Expedia Scrapers in 2024
While you can certainly build your own Expedia web scraper in Python, starting with an existing tool saves enormous time and effort. Here are the top solutions:
1. ScraperAPI
Why it‘s the best:
- 10 million requests per month with affordable plans
- Fast extraction with highly reliable proxies
- Easy workflow with no coding needed
- Unlimited scraping on free plan up to 1,000 records
- Automatically formats data into JSON, CSV, etc.
ScraperAPI provides the best overall combination of large-scale scraping power, usability and features. With its generous free trial, you can test it out at no cost to confirm it works for your needs.
2. BrightData
Key features:
- Pool of 72 million IPs for unmatched scale
- Automatically solves CAPTCHAs
- Custom scrapers available
- Pay only for the data you extract
- 14-day free trial
BrightData is the leading proxy and data extraction company, making them well-suited for heavy Expedia scraping.
3. ScrapeStorm
Notable perks:
- Affordable pricing starting at $30/month
- User-friendly web interface
- Constantly updated proxies from around the world
- Scrape in real-time or scheduled
- 14-day free trial
ScrapeStorm strikes a great balance between usability, reliability and pricing.
4. Scrapy Cloud
Why it stands out:
- Built specifically for Python Scrapy
- Deploy Scrapy spiders at scale in the cloud
- Adds proxy support, debugging, and automation
- Integrates with storage and email
- 14-day free trial
If you want to run Python Scrapy spiders for Expedia at scale, Scrapy Cloud is purpose-built for it.
5. Phantombuster
Notable features:
- Point-and-click web scraper construction
- Automatic proxy rotation
- Built-in tools like email verifiers
- API and browser bot options
- Generous free plan with 1000 requests
Phantombuster makes it easy to build Expedia scrapers visually without coding skills.
Applications for Expedia Scraped Data
Now that you can easily obtain large amounts of travel data from Expedia, what can you do with it? Here are some of the top applications:
Competitor price monitoring
Track prices over time for flights and hotels across OTA competitors like Priceline and Travelocity. React to price changes with your own pricing adjustments.
Metasearch optimization
Analyze Expedia‘s hotel details, descriptions, amenities and rankings. Then optimize your own property content to align with top-performing listings on Expedia.
Flight deal alert services
Scrape flight and package prices constantly. When significant sales are detected, notify subscribers via email and text to book discounted trips.
Travel startup data population
If you‘re building any type of travel product, extensive Expedia data can help populate it with real-world offerings to demonstrate its usefulness.
Market and trend analysis
Analyze historical Expedia data to detect trends around destinations, hotel prices by season, average airfare based on trip duration, and more.
Clearly travel data from Expedia can be immensely useful for both research and commercial purposes in the hospitality sector.
Building a Custom Expedia Scraper with Python
While pre-built tools make scraping easy, you may want the flexibility of your own Python scraper. Here‘s how:
Import Python modules
Use Requests for sending requests, Beautiful Soup to parse HTML, and time for delays:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import timeRequest the page
Pass the Expedia URL into Requests to download page content:
url = ‘https://www.expedia.com/Hotel-Search?destination=NewYork&startDate=2023-03-01‘
page = requests.get(url)Parse the HTML
Pass the page content into Beautiful Soup:
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, ‘html.parser‘)Extract and store data
Find elements and extract text into variables based on HTML tags/classes:
names = soup.find_all(‘h2‘, {‘class‘: ‘uitk-heading-5‘})
prices = soup.find_all(‘div‘, {‘class‘: ‘uitk-cell all-cell-shrink‘})
for name, price in zip(names, prices):
print(name.text, price.text) Store scraped data in lists/dictionaries.
Handle pagination
Increment page number in URL to scrape additional pages:
last_page = soup.find(‘span‘, {‘data-lastpage‘: True})[‘data-lastpage‘]
for page in range(1, int(last_page)+1):
url = f‘https://www.expedia.com/Hotel-Search?destination=NewYork&startDate=2023-01&page={page}‘
# Make request, parse, extract data Apply proxies
To avoid IP bans, use proxy services like ScraperAPI:
session = requests.Session()
session.proxies = {
"http": "http://scraperapi:[email protected]:8001",
"https": "http://scraperapi:[email protected]:8001",
}
session.get(url) This provides a framework for building your own Expedia scraper with Python. Next I‘ll cover techniques to avoid detection.
Bypassing Expedia Bot Detection
Expedia utilizes several anti-bot measures you‘ll need to circumvent:
IP Rate Limiting – blocks IPs sending excessive requests
IP Banning – permanently blacklists scraping IPs
CAPTCHAs – prompts users to prove they aren‘t bots
Here are effective tactics to avoid triggering these protections:
Proxies – Route traffic through residential proxies to mask scraping IPs.
Random delays – Add 2-10 second pauses between requests to mimic human behavior.
User-agent rotation – Spoof randomized browser user-agent strings per request.
Headless browsers – Selenium, Puppeteer to bypass CAPTCHAs and render JavaScript.
With the right combination of evasion techniques, you can scrape Expedia at scale while avoiding disruptive blocks.
Scraping Expedia Ethically and Legally
While scraping Expedia in itself falls into an ethical grey area, you can ensure responsible data collection:
- Honor robots.txt: Check this file for guidelines from the site owner.
- Limit request volume: Avoid hammering the site with thousands per second.
- Scrape during off-peak hours: Lower load on the servers.
- Use data caches: Avoid re-scraping the same data repeatedly.
- Rotate proxies: Use many IPs to distribute traffic.
- Credit sources: If publishing scraped data, cite Expedia as the source.
In addition, consult local laws and regulations around data scraping to ensure compliance. With reasonable precautions, you can scrape Expedia ethically and legally.
Closing Thoughts
Scraping Expedia provides access to its vast trove of travel data encompassing hotels, flights, rentals, reviews and more. For quick, managed scraping, a purpose-built tool like ScraperAPI is my top recommendation based on performance and ease of use.
The data applications are nearly limitless, from price monitoring to travel startup population and beyond. With ethical practices, you can build scrapers to extract the Expedia data useful for your business or research purposes.
Soon you‘ll be scraping travel insights and optimizing your own offerings powered by Expedia‘s data, helping connect more people with their dream vacations. The possibilities are wide open. Happy and safe travels!
