Airbnb has become the go-to platform for travelers looking to book accommodations around the world. With over 6 million listings across 100,000 cities, Airbnb offers a wealth of data that can provide valuable insights for various industries and applications. However, Airbnb does not provide a public API for accessing this data at scale. This guide will teach you how to scrape Airbnb listings data using Python and Selenium.
An Overview of Airbnb Data
The Airbnb marketplace contains a huge trove of information on rental properties worldwide. Each listing includes details like:
- Price per night
- Number of guests
- Number of bedrooms/bathrooms
- Listing descriptions
- Photos
- Location/address
- Host information
- Reviews and ratings
This data can reveal insights into local accommodation markets, travel trends, pricing strategies, and more. Airbnb does not make their full marketplace data accessible via an API. However, we can scrape this information by automating a web browser.
Is Web Scraping Airbnb Legal?
An important consideration is whether scraping Airbnb data aligns with legal and ethical standards. The short answer is yes, web scraping public data is legal in most jurisdictions. However, there are some best practices to follow:
- Only scrape data visible to public users, don‘t try to access private account info.
- Respect Airbnb‘s Terms of Service and don‘t overload their servers.
- Avoid scraping data protected by copyright, such as photos.
- Follow data protection regulations like GDPR if storing any personal data.
As long as you scrape responsibly, extracting publicly listed property data from Airbnb is typically permissible. But always consult a lawyer if unsure!
Why Scrape Airbnb Data? Useful Applications
Here are some potential uses cases for scraped Airbnb data:
Market research – Analyze listing data to identify lucrative neighborhoods, popular amenities, pricing trends, etc. This can help investors or new hosts.
Competitive intelligence – Track your competitors‘ pricing and availability over time. Understand competitive forces in your market.
Geography/urban studies – Map where Airbnb listings are concentrated to study impacts on housing and gentrification.
Travel analytics – Determine the most popular destinations, average daily rates, seasonal patterns, and more to inform your travel startup.
Price monitoring – Get notifications when prices for specific listings drop below a threshold. Help travelers find deals.
Sentiment analysis – Mine review text to identify the highest rated listings and most common complaints.
The applications are vast. Scraped Airbnb data can provide a competitive edge for many travel, real estate, and analytics use cases.
Challenges of Scraping Airbnb
While Airbnb‘s public data is fair game to scrape, doing so comes with some technical hurdles:
No public API – Unlike some sites, Airbnb does not provide an API to fetch listing data systematically. We have to scrape the front-end.
Bot detection – Airbnb tries to prevent large-scale scraping bots via methods like browser fingerprinting. Scrapers may get blocked.
Data limits – Airbnb limits search results, so scrapers need to paginate through location/date filters to get complete data.
Dynamic content – Listings load dynamically via JavaScript. Scrapers need browsers to render JavaScript.
To overcome these challenges, we‘ll use a proxy rotation service and Selenium with a real browser.
Recommended Proxy Services
When scraping sites like Airbnb at scale, using proxy services is recommended to avoid getting blocked. Here are some good options:
BrightData – Reliable residential proxies with unlimited bandwidth. Excellent scraper success rates.
Smartproxy – Diverse proxy networks across datacenters and residential IPs. Helpful controls.
Oxylabs – Large proxy pool with support for scripts/automation. Decent pricing.
Proxies allow each request to come from a different IP address. This fools Airbnb‘s bot protection and lets you scrape smoothly. Now let‘s see how to build an Airbnb scraper with Python and Selenium.
Scraping Airbnb with Python + Selenium
To scrape Airbnb listings data, we‘ll use the Selenium library to control a Firefox browser. Our scraper will:
- Search for listings based on a location and date range
- Extract listing data from each search result page
- Click through pagination to get all available listings
- Store scraped data as JSON/CSV/Excel
Here are the key steps:
Install Python Libraries
We need to install Selenium, Pandas, and some helpers:
pip install selenium pandas webdriver-managerSelenium will drive the browser. Pandas helps process scraped data as DataFrames.
Launch WebDriver
First, we‘ll launch a Firefox browser using Selenium‘s WebDriver:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.service import Service
from webdriver_manager.firefox import GeckoDriverManager
driver = webdriver.Firefox(service=Service(GeckoDriverManager().install()))This automatically handles driver setup. Next, we‘ll write functions to scrape each page.
Scrape Listing Data
To extract info from each search result, we can query the DOM:
# Extract listing data from DOM
def extract_listing_data(driver):
name = driver.find_element(‘css selector‘, ‘.listing-name‘).text
price = driver.find_element(‘css selector‘, ‘.price‘).text
# And so on for other fields
return {
‘name‘: name,
‘price‘: price
} We locate elements by CSS selector and extract info like name, price, reviews, etc.
Paginate Through Results
To get all listings, we need to click through pagination links:
# Scroll and click next page
def paginate(driver):
driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)")
try:
next_button = driver.find_element(‘css selector‘, ‘.next-pagination‘)
next_button.click()
except NoSuchElementException:
return False
return TrueThis scrolls to the bottom and clicks the next button until exhausted.
Tie It All Together
Finally, we initialize a list to store data and scrape each page in a loop:
# Initialise empty list to store data
listings_data = []
# Set search parameters
driver.get(‘https://www.airbnb.com/s/Paris--France/homes?tab_id=home_tab&refinement_paths%5B%5D=%2Fhomes&flexible_trip_dates%5B%5D=april&flexible_trip_dates%5B%5D=march&flexible_trip_lengths%5B%5D=weekend_trip&date_picker_type=calendar&checkin=2023-03-01&checkout=2023-03-31&adults=1‘)
while True:
# Extract data from current page
listing_data = extract_listing_data(driver)
# Add data to list
listings_data.append(listing_data)
# Try paginate
if not paginate(driver):
# Stop loop if no next page
break
# Convert our list of dicts to a pandas DataFrame
listings_df = pandas.DataFrame(listings_data)And that‘s it! We can now export listings_df as JSON, CSV, Excel etc.
Analyzing and Storing Scraped Data
Once you‘ve collected Airbnb data, it‘s time for the fun part – analysis and storage! Here are some tips:
Data cleaning – Fix any errors, deduplicate records, handle missing values. Get data ready for analysis.
Analysis – Aggregate, slice and dice, visualize. Look for patterns and insights. Pandas is great for this.
Cloud databases – For larger datasets, store scraped data in the cloud. Options like MongoDB Atlas provide scalable storage.
Data warehouses – Use BigQuery or Redshift to analyze scraping results alongside other data sources. Support dashboards and apps.
Automation – Schedule scrape runs and analysis workflows with Airflow. Keep your Airbnb data updated automatically.
There are many possibilities once the data has been scraped! The key is having a plan for what you want to get out of the data before collecting it.
Additional Resources
Hopefully this guide provides a good starting point for scraping your own Airbnb data using Python and Selenium. Here are some additional resources for learning more about web scraping:
Selenium documentation – Official docs cover Selenium usage in depth.
Web Scraping with Python – Tutorial from ScrapingBee covering advanced scraping techniques.
How to Scrape JavaScript Sites – Guide to handling sites with heavy JS like Airbnb.
Choosing a Proxy Service – Overview of popular residential proxy options.
Web Scraping Laws – Summary of legal precedent on web scraping.
Scraping Airbnb data can provide valuable insights, but requires careful implementation. I hope these tips help you extract and analyze Airbnb listings data smoothly. Let me know if you have any other questions!
