Priceline Scraper for Hotel, Flight and Rental Car Data

Priceline Hotel Rows, Fare Rows and Car Offers, Field by Field

A lodging row is keyed twice. The numeric hotelId is the stable handle that survives a slug rewrite, and the itemKey beside it is a base64 blob that unpacks into the whole question the price answered: hotel id, rooms, adults, children, currency and the rate product, which reads CORE on every public row. Lose the key and you are left with a number that no longer states who it was quoted for.

What we extract from Priceline on the lodging side:

• Property - name, long description, star rating on a half-step scale that runs 0, 2, 2.5 and upward to 5, city id, street line, city, postcode and the property phone number.
• Reputation - a guest rating scored out of ten, the total review count, and the reviews themselves, where a first name or the label Verified Hotel Guest stands in for the author and the praise and the complaint sit in two separate text fields, either of which can be empty.
• Rooms - room name, floor area in square feet, bed configuration written out as 1 King or 2 Single and 1 Sofabed, the per-room amenity list and the photo count.
• Rate - the starting nightly figure, the strike-through reference printed beside it, and the per-person figure that bundle cards use instead.
• Policies - check-in and check-out clocks, the pet rule, and the free-text block where deposit holds, card-holder-present rules and group thresholds are buried.

A fare row is a different animal: origin and destination codes with coordinates, departure and arrival stamps, elapsed duration, segment count, the stops list, the marketing carrier per leg, the validating carrier, a cabin code and the amount with its currency. Price-drop rows add a strike price and the percentage cut. A car offer carries a daily rate, a total, the number of rental days, the pickup stamp, a supplier code and a location code, then a vehicle block - class, example model, seats, bags, automatic flag - and a features block for pay-now, credit-card-required, unlimited mileage, free cancellation and online check-in. Car rates are labelled as including taxes and fees; the nightly hotel figure is a starting rate, and the tax and fee line only resolves at room level in the booking flow.

Express Deals, VIP Levels and the Edge of a Public Priceline Crawl

Express Deals is the surface that makes this site different from its siblings, and it is also the one that breaks naive joins. On a route page an express row carries origin, destination, departure date, an amount and a currency - and nothing that identifies an airline. The carrier field is a dash. Priceline's footnote settles the rest: the travel provider is shown after booking. On the lodging side the same idea sells a stay by star rating and area with the name withheld, and the car funnel still reserves paths named for opaque booking, inherited from the Name Your Own Price era, whose route is also still reserved.

VIP is a second price surface rather than a discount code. The ladder runs member, blue, gold and platinum, reached at two, five and twenty-five completed trips, with the co-branded card granting gold outright. Each step widens exclusive hotel savings, rental car discounts and add-on deals, raises the Express Deal coupon issued after every trip, and moves you up the support queue; the Best Price Guarantee refunds a VIP member up to 200% of a price difference. All of it sits behind sign-in, so we do not collect it - we log the public rate and mark that a member tier exists above it.

Two more traps. A strike-through price here is a Priceline-constructed reference, compared against the most recent actual or an estimated average retail price on the site, not a rival's number. And the crawl rules close the flight and car search paths and an internal flight namespace, so they stay out of scope. We do not sign in, we do not touch checkout, and reviewer first names are dropped by default.