In this article, we are going to understand how hotel search APIs can help you promote your travel or hotel business to new heights. There are many hotel APIs in the market. Some APIs provide booking architecture and some provide hotel prices. But in this article, we are going to cover a hotel search API that provides hotel prices from more than 200 OTAs like booking.com, Expedia, hotels.com, etc.
Comparing more than 200 OTAs
Comparing your prices with big OTAs provides your clients with a transparent panel for hotel booking. Studies show people prefer websites that show competitive prices. This is how Amazon works. Amazon.com puts an ad against the same product with an even lower price. This helps Amazon to gain more trust. Amazon earns some brownie points even if the user does not purchase anything. The same concept applies to the hotel business as well. Tracking your niche market helps you to keep your prices in check. You can adjust your prices to gain more bookings. It helps you to offer aggressive discounts (clients love that). Ultimately you will end up with more hotel bookings or travel trips.
An insurance company Progressive had a market valuation of $3.8 billion before applying this method. When they applied this method, they saw a huge surge in their market cap. It went up to $12B.
The data is fresh and real-time. Whenever a GET request is made to the API, API pulls fresh data from OTAs. You can search any city or hotel within the API. It covers almost every hotel around the world. API returns JSON data with prices from multiple vendors and the ID of that particular hotel.
Sample response from the API
Various Travel Agencies and businesses collect a tremendous amount of data from their niche websites. Not only do they understand that to gain an edge in the market they must access their competitor’s data by using hotel API, yet also the focus to feed their competitors with priced-up data remains extremely clear. To secure their competitive advantage, sharp pricing, businesses tend to block every access. With hotel search API you always have an ace up your sleeve.
You can also use a web scraping API to extract hotel prices from multiple vendors. You just have to pass the URL of that target page and the complete data will be pulled in raw HTML form. You can then parse the data out using libraries like BeautifulSoup in Python or cheerio in node.js.
You can also focus on extracting reviews and rating data from different websites. By tracking reviews, you can avoid making those mistakes. Also, you can create a list of points where the hotel needs to focus in order to improve its rating.
Follow the below-given steps to test the API.
The first step is to get the JWT token from auth API. It is a POST API where you have to pass your credentials in a JSON body. It will return a token.
The second step is to use the main GET API. You have to pass that token in headers with the key as Authorization. Then it will return a JSON object with all the prices and names.
