Daniel - July 12, 2021
In this article, I’ll show you how to scrape data from TripAdvisor.
In February 2000, Langley Steinert and Stephen Kaufer started TripAdvisor, which is based in Newton, Massachusetts. TripAdvisor, Inc. is an online travel research company that helps people plan and enjoy their ideal vacation.
Through its flagship TripAdvisor brand, TripAdvisor’s travel research platform provides reviews and comments from its community of travelers about destinations and lodgings.
This includes hotels, bed & breakfasts, specialty lodging, and vacation rentals, restaurants, and activities across the world. TripAdvisor has various branded websites including tripadvisor.com in the United States and 34 others in various countries. For example, there’s daodao.com in China.
Aside from travel-related material, TripAdvisor’s websites also offer connections to its travel advertisers’ websites, allowing travelers to book their travel plans directly.
Furthermore, the company manages and operates websites under 21 additional travel media brands, all of which share the purpose of offering complete travel planning services across the travel sector.
TripAdvisor featured different traveling and lodging deals with some of the best prices you’ll find. With this data, you can gain an advantage over your competition if you’re a travelling or lodging company. However, there are just too many hotels, and manually retrieving data from the many TripAdvisor websites is difficult.
With web scraping, it’ll be very easy. A web scraping bot can extract all of the hotel pricing information, as well as discounts and bundles, into a CSV file that you can process and use to get ahead of the competition. This allows you to easily keep track of and monitor hotel price changes in real time as they occur.
However, web scraping is an activity that must be carried out responsibly in order to avoid causing harm to the websites being scraped. Web scrapers can retrieve data considerably faster and in greater depth than regular internet users. Hence, poor scraping methods might affect the website’s speed.
This is why most websites have anti-scraping techniques that can result in your web scraping bot getting blocked. It doesn’t matter if you’re following good or bad web scraping techniques; if your bot is detected, you’ll be blocked. One way to avoid this block is by using a proxy.
Your IP address is visible when scraping. A website will be able to tell what you’re doing and whether or not you’re using a bot. Multiple queries from the same IP address will result in your account being blocked because only a bot can do such.
With a proxy, you can use different IP addresses. When we send requests through a proxy, the target website – TripAdvisor in this case – has no idea where the originating IP is coming from which makes it more difficult to detect your bot.
To scrape data from TripAdvisor, you can use residential or datacenter proxies. Residential proxies are more anonymous than datacenter proxies while datacenter proxies are faster than residential proxies. What you should consider most, however, is the proxy service you use.
If you want to get the best proxy both in performance and price, you should get your proxy from ProxyRack. There are over 5 million residential and 20,000 datacenter proxies available and you can target a variety of countries and cities throughout the world.
Furthermore, you can target specific Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with the residential proxies and the datacenter proxies have a high success rate.
Here are the pricing plans;
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
Web scraping is a straightforward task but some measures are required for it to be successful. If you want to scrape data from TripAdvisor, a good web scraping bot isn’t enough. You also need a good proxy which you can purchase from ProxyRack.