May 4th, 2020
Scraping Listings from AirBnB with Python and BeautifulSoup

One of the biggest applications of Web Scraping is in scraping hotel listings from various sites. This could be to monitor prices, create an aggregator, or provide better UX on top of existing hotel booking websites.

Here is a simple script that does that. We will use BeautifulSoup to help us extract information and we will retrieve hotel information on Airbnb.com.

To start with, this is the boilerplate code we need to get the Airbnb.com search results page and set up BeautifulSoup to help us use CSS selectors to query the page for meaningful data.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

headers = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9'}
url = 'https://www.airbnb.co.in/s/New-York--NY--United-States/homes?query=New York, NY, United States&checkin=2020-03-12&checkout=2020-03-19&adults=4&children=1&infants=0&guests=5&place_id=ChIJOwg_06VPwokRYv534QaPC8g&refinement_paths[]=/for_you&toddlers=0&source=mc_search_bar&search_type=unknown'

response=requests.get(url,headers=headers)


soup=BeautifulSoup(response.content,'lxml')

We are also p[assing the user agent headers to simulate a browser call so we dont get blocked.

Now let's analyze the Airbnb search results for a destination we want. This is how it looks.

And when we inspect the page we find that each of the items HTML is encapsulated in a tag with the attribute itemprop with the value itemListElement.

We could just use this to break the HTML document into these cards which contain individual item information like this.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

headers = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9'}
url = 'https://www.airbnb.co.in/s/New-York--NY--United-States/homes?query=New York, NY, United States&checkin=2020-03-12&checkout=2020-03-19&adults=4&children=1&infants=0&guests=5&place_id=ChIJOwg_06VPwokRYv534QaPC8g&refinement_paths[]=/for_you&toddlers=0&source=mc_search_bar&search_type=unknown'

response=requests.get(url,headers=headers)


soup=BeautifulSoup(response.content,'lxml')

#print(soup.select('.a-carousel-card')[0].get_text())

for item in soup.select('[itemprop=itemListElement]'):
	try:
		print('----------------------------------------')
		print(item)


		print('----------------------------------------')
	except Exception as e:
		#raise e
		print('')

And when you run it...

python3 scrapeAirbnb.py

You can tell that the code is isolating the cards HTML.

On further inspection, you can see that the name of the bed and breakfast always have the property aria-label. So let's try and retrieve that.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

headers = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9'}
url = 'https://www.airbnb.co.in/s/New-York--NY--United-States/homes?query=New York, NY, United States&checkin=2020-03-12&checkout=2020-03-19&adults=4&children=1&infants=0&guests=5&place_id=ChIJOwg_06VPwokRYv534QaPC8g&refinement_paths[]=/for_you&toddlers=0&source=mc_search_bar&search_type=unknown'

response=requests.get(url,headers=headers)


soup=BeautifulSoup(response.content,'lxml')

#print(soup.select('.a-carousel-card')[0].get_text())

for item in soup.select('[itemprop=itemListElement]'):
	try:
		print('----------------------------------------')
		print(item.select('a')[0]['aria-label'])
		#name = item.find("meta",  itemprop="name")
		print(name)

		print('----------------------------------------')
	except Exception as e:
		#raise e
		print('')

That will get us the names.

Bingo!

Now let's get the other data pieces..

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

headers = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9'}
url = 'https://www.airbnb.co.in/s/New-York--NY--United-States/homes?query=New York, NY, United States&checkin=2020-03-12&checkout=2020-03-19&adults=4&children=1&infants=0&guests=5&place_id=ChIJOwg_06VPwokRYv534QaPC8g&refinement_paths[]=/for_you&toddlers=0&source=mc_search_bar&search_type=unknown'

response=requests.get(url,headers=headers)


soup=BeautifulSoup(response.content,'lxml')


for item in soup.select('[itemprop=itemListElement]'):
	try:
		print('----------------------------------------')
		print(item.select('a')[0]['aria-label'])
		print(item.select('a')[0]['href'])
		print(item.select('._krjbj')[0].get_text())
		print(item.select('._krjbj')[1].get_text())
		print(item.select('._16shi2n')[0].get_text())

		print(item.select('._zkkcbwd')[0].get_text())
		print(name)

		print('----------------------------------------')
	except Exception as e:
		#raise e
		print('')

And when run.

Produces all the info we need including ratings, reviews, link, price, and discounted price.

In more advanced implementations you will need to even rotate the User-Agent string so Airbnb cant tell its the same browser!

If we get a little bit more advanced, you will realize that Airbnb can simply block your IP ignoring all your other tricks. This is a bummer and this is where most web crawling projects fail.

Overcoming IP Blocks

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