Just a quick post for any forum members with accommodation offering.
I am coming close to a beta release for my rate scraper system if anyone is interested.
Will be able to offer trial and preferential rate going forward for those who are early takers during beta stage trials.
In simple terms it gives ability to easily check competitor prices on mass from booking.com etc and potentially their own website depending on system they use and will later have function for continued monitor and reporting comparing your rates against theirs so you can keep ahead when pricing your services.
Obviously at the minute hotels etc are struggling if not closed however this system will help you beat your competition on what will likely be a very competitive market coming out of coronavirus situation.
To be clear this is not a samba integration or samba related system, just offering forum members the opertunity to test out beta version and preferential rate when officially launched.
Know it should probably be an add or in lounge but wanted to let as many see as I could in hope of getting some interest to help test the beta.
To give a quick idea of the basic offering, this is the ‘rate breakdown’ report from the testing/backend for a property locally. Their direct booking site/system also makes availability open to be scrapped which is an additional bonus, potentially allowing for monitoring of this also so you can keep ahead of the curve say if your competitor does weddings/functions where you get overflow bookings from allowing you to adjust rates etc to maximise revenue knowing that the competitor has sold large number fo rooms or is getting close to filling up. Its not as refined as what is planned for front end and being dates well into the future (short term dates are closed out due to coronavirus closures) but this really offers great advantage when competing on price for last minute prices where many places will manually manipulate their rates to try and boost last minute occupancy.
I don’t have a hotel but live in an area that depends on tourism and I have lots of people who work in or own hotels, hostels, airbnbs. If it’s okay, I’d like to have a look. Perhaps it’s something that could be of use to the smaller guys here on the island.
Sounds good, its still a work in progress with a long way off on an official launch but basic functions I hope to have ready within a few weeks.
What I will be needing shortly to expand alpha testing is additional property to start scraping beyond the original 8 i started with. I could pick these at random but would be good to get some initial ‘requests’ from real people.
Ideally need URL of property direct website/booking engine and its booking.com profile along with the same for a couple of competitors.
PM probably best.
What would be really handy would be if there are two with overlapping competitors as hope to start with scope for efficient scaling in such that two users tracking the same property results in it only being scrapped once rather than duplicating work for each.
I don’t know if you plan on an airbnb integration at some point, but I could see a big demand for something like this among property owners here. Whether they’ll pay or not is another issue
Should be able to, will add to list of potential OTAa.
The bigger the channel the easier it is to justify with increased number of properties and value to future users since build the profiles to be dynamic so only have to script the once.
I will take a look, even if a direct connection via api is not posible web scrape of the booking engine website is generally posible. Can you send a link to your online booking page?