Booking.com Data: 12 Cities, 6 Airports, a Screenshot for Every Price
For several years, weekly car rental and, more recently, hotel prices from Booking.com for a tourism organization comparing its destination with rivals.
Primo Tours first: one charter site as the test
The client asked to start with one site from the list, Primo Tours. We collected every direct departure it showed from the airport, four months of departures, in the client's own four columns. The client replied that the file looked perfect and wanted to start with ten sites.
The client first asked about a contract for a full year. In the end it chose a pilot: samples from 12 operators, Primo Tours included. Then the other 11 samples were paid for.
A charter flight hides inside a holiday package
Most of these operators sell package holidays, not seats. A flight shows up as part of a trip with a hotel, so one departure to a resort can appear once for every hotel it serves. For the airport, that is still one flight. Each file therefore has one row per date and destination:
- two hotels on the same flight give one row, not two;
- several airlines flying to the same destination on the same day also give one row;
- a date gets a row only if at least one direct flight goes there;
- destinations are written as names, such as Las Palmas, Porto Santo or Antalya, not as airport codes.
Some sites look different. Ticket.dk works more like a flight search site and lists 58 destinations. A few operators sell ski trips, and their first departures on sale were months ahead, in the winter season, so their samples show that first month.
Twelve charter samples in two weeks
The paid samples went out one by one as each site was ready. Folkeferie came on the day of the order, then Mixxtravel, then Nazar and Suncharter. Nortlander, Danski, Slopetrotter, Escape Away and Solfaktor followed together, then TUI, and Ticket was last, 15 days after the order.
One sample is empty: Slopetrotter had no departures on sale from the airport at the time.
What the pilot gave the airport
Fifteen days after the order, the airport had 12 CSV files in one layout, one per tour operator, each listing direct charter departures by month, weekday, date and destination. Primo Tours covered four months of departures; the other sites covered their nearest month on sale. The project stopped at the pilot: no regular delivery followed the samples.
See our Primo Tours scraper, our TUI scraper and our travel and hospitality data service. To test a set of travel sites with paid samples first, contact our team.
