Getting hotel data is extremely helpful, as it helps get commercial and business insights. Unfortunately, getting the needed data can be a challenging task. Scraping, fortunately, changefs the story.
Extracting hotel web data gives insight into prices, ratings, reviews, etc. Access to these data points at scale helps you find growth opportunities. It also becomes easy to execute sentiment analysis, price comparison, etc.
You need proxies to launch an efficient web scraping campaign for your hotel successfully. This article will expand on everything you need about hotel data scraping with proxies.
Table of Contents
What are Proxies?
A proxy is a server that serves as a gateway between users’ computers and the internet. It adds a level of safety to private networks. Beyond offering security, proxies can also add to performance and accessibility.
They create an intermediary that changes the IP address of the client’s computer. Changing a computer’s IP address makes it difficult for a third party to identify the owner of a particular traffic.
So, when you have a proxy installed on your network, you can easily bypass areas where your IP address has been banned. Also, masking your address makes it easy to access geo-blocked content.
Many organizations use proxies specifically to serve as a firewall, which helps to protect their computers from malware. You can also do that for your local computer network.
It maintains proper internet traffic balance for organizations, which ultimately prevents crashes. Also, these servers limit the sites an organization’s employees can have access to.
Furthermore, thanks to the caching capabilities of most proxies, they help large organizations save bandwidth. This translates to cost-cutting for such companies.
Hence, while you scrape data from the websites of different hotels, you can be sure of total protection from third parties. You also don’t have to worry about the website owners finding out that you’re scraping their website.
Most website owners use different anti-bot services to protect their platforms from being scraped. While scraping is technically legal, having access to data from a competitor’s website gives you an advantage. No business entity wants to give its competition such an advantage.
If, however, you’re trying to get data for personal purposes like ticket buying, the hotel owners may be OK with scraping their data. Unfortunately, since hotel website owners can’t quickly determine if scraping traffic is from a competitor or an individual, the anti-scraping measures will act against you.
Though, if you choose the best proxy available, you’ll be able to get some much-needed data. Let’s find out how you can do that.
How to Choose the Best Proxy to Buy Tickets
There are numerous proxy servers out there. But if you need data for activities like ticket buying or choosing the best services possible, you probably need to get a residential proxy. Residential proxies replace your computer’s original IP address with that of a house. Unlike most other proxy services, the new address attached to your computer doesn’t belong to a data center.
Residential proxies are very effective, and here are pointers that can help you select the best of them.
IP rotation
If presented with different residential proxies, ensure that the one you pick is rotating. This is important because static residential proxies also exist.
Rotating residential proxies are designed to give your computer a new IP address every time you connect. So, if your scraping code launches a request 10,000 thousand times, you’ll get 10,000 unique IPs.
Rotating residential proxies give you better anonymity, and its anti-scraping tools won’t flag your requests as spam. To the website, your computer’s traffic will seem like entirely different users.
Location availability
Location is another vital factor to consider. Proxies have areas they can serve. Ensure that the proxy you choose works for your destination. Most proxies tend to assign random locations when browsing. However, to get hotel data, you need specified locations. This will help you get better performance and speed for your scraping process.
Geo-targeting
The proxy you choose should also be capable of geo-targeting. To get the needed amount of data, you must be able to connect to different desired locations. Beyond simply being capable of geo-targeting, the specificity of the functionality is also essential. The more specific the target, the better.
Please do your research to validate whatever the proxy service claims about its geo-targeting, though. You shouldn’t waste money on a feature that won’t fly.
Conclusion
Being able to extract data from web pages when needed is essential. However, due to the various preventive measures available these days, it’s become complicated. Hence, you need the right proxy server to get what you want. That’s where rotating residential proxies come in.
