Booked vs Blocked?

How to Determine if a Short Term Rental (STR) Date is Booked or Blocked from Scraped Data?

When scraping a channel like Airbnb or Vrbo, you will received back unavailable or available which makes further analysis difficult. Being able to distill between booked versus blocked and the length of a booked reservation is critical to any analysis on STR data. Since 2015 major OTAs have blocked this information from scrapers and the public. 

Hungry Robots has been building scraping products since 2012 and has adapted to the changes of channels to deliver the best data products. To solve this challenge Hungry Robots has developed advanced modeling to produce a booked, blocked or available signal. 

How Hungry Robots determines if a date is booked or blocked

Hungry Robots collects source reservations from more than 250,000 listings globally to give us a base line to leveraging AI and machine learning models that look at dozens of booking characteristics to accurately determine what happened. 

Some booking characteristics our models evaluate are lead time, length of stay, location and more to accurately determine if a given date has been booked or blocked. Our models are constantly learning and evolving and learning to become more accurate over time and to adapt with changing consumer behaviors. 

Curious to learn more about Hungry Robots data? Reach out and set up time with an expert to learn more.