Daniel - July 21, 2021
How To Scrape Data From Agoda
In this article, we’ll be looking at how to scrape data from Agoda.
About Agoda
Agoda is an online search website for travellers. You can use this website to find the best travel agencies to use, the best hotels, vacation rentals, airport transfers, flights, and more. The website is a subsidiary of the Booking Holdings company after its acquisition and it was launched in 2003 in Thailand.
The website is very simple to use. From the homepage, you’ll find a booking tab. Once you enter your destination, check-in and checkout time, the number of people you’re traveling with, and any other additional destinations, hit the search button. The aggregator site will scan the internet for the best possible travel and accommodation deals that meet your search criteria.
It works very fast and you’ll get results in as little as 5 seconds. To further meet your interest, you can filter the search result by price, star rating, guest rating, payment options, facilities, and neighborhood amongst others. You can also directly search for a particular property or travel agency using keywords.
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You can make use of Agoda for free via your browser. Aside from the website, Agoda also features mobile applications for Android and iOS devices. Another app that supports Agoda booking is Grab.
Why Scrape Agoda?
Agoda contains data on hotels and travel agencies. It also contains data on star and guest ratings which reveals the performance of the hotels and travel agencies. If you want to get such data, web scraping is the best possible way to do so.
You can visit Agoda and copy information about a hotel and its star rating. What happens if you want to copy information about every hotel and their star rating in an entire country, take Thailand for example. Thailand has more than 60,000 hotels. Copy the information one by one will take you 120 days if you manage to copy 500 per day. That’s about 4 months.
Manual copy and paste will only waste your time which is why web scraping is the best way to extract data from websites. Web scraping involves using an automated bot. This is a program, designed to extract specific data. You can specify your bot to extract just hotel names, reviews, star ratings, guest ratings, or all of the above.
The bot will access the Agoda website via HTML and extract all data at once. What would take you 4 months to do manually can take less than a minute with a web scraping bot.
How To Scrape Data From Agoda
As mentioned earlier, web scraping involves using bots. Hence, you need a good web scraper. There are many such scraping bots available online. Another thing you need is a proxy. Accessing a website automatically via scripts is something cyber criminals are synonymous with. That’s how they hack and inject malicious code.
To prevent such, websites block all automatic traffic as they aren’t human traffic. While you’re not a hacker, your scraping bot will still get blocked as it causes automatic traffic. It’s easy to detect bots as they send and intercept requests much faster than a regular user.
With a proxy, you can keep your bot hidden by constantly changing your IP address. When you switch to a new IP address, you’ll appear like a new user on the Agoda website. If you keep switching at intervals, it’ll appear like different regular users instead of one bot. That way, the website won’t detect your bot and you won’t get blocked.
The Best Proxies To Use
Not all proxies are reliable. If you use a bad proxy, it’ll be a lot easier for your bot to be blocked. If you need reliable proxies to scrape data from Agoda, ProxyRack is an ideal proxy provider to patronize.
You have both residential and datacenter proxy options. Check them out below;
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
Bottom Line
Data available on Agoda can be useful in many ways. A good scraping bot and a reliable proxy is what you need to scrape it.
