Techtalks: Traveltech

Hi there,

Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut for building a price comparison tool.

You may think of web scraping - extracting prices using crawlers. But be aware that it will entail a lot of headache such as inventory consistency and even lawsuits.

A legal way of doing so is to get OTAs’ permission to source their prices. By partnering with Expedia, you’ll get access to its EPS Rapid Shopping API that returns available rooms with live rates and other details like promos, rate refundability, cancellation penalties, etc.

As for Booking.com, they offer Demand API that allows for retrieving live rates and availability. However, they prohibit the affiliates to use their property content for price comparison. But maybe you’ll manage to find a way around that through the direct communication with the OTA.

After you’ve affiliated with these hospitality giants, next comes inventory mapping. And here hotel mapping providers may be of help to you. They’ll take care that the prices are correct and all the hotel-related data is aligned eliminating any duplicates.

Once you connect to a hotel’s channel manager and the OTAs via their APIs from one side, and to a hotel mapping provider’s API from the other side, you’re all set to build your price comparison widget. Alternatively, you can turn to a tech company like AltexSoft, so that we can do it for you.

Well, you can use Hotel Price Comparison API for that purpose. It compares more than 200 Hotel OTAs like Booking.xom, Exoedia, Agoda, Priceline, Orbitz, TripAdvisor, ZenHotels, Hotels.com, MMT, HRS, etc. It provides JSON response with all the hotels in a city with top 6 cheapest vendors. You can either search for a city or a particular Hotel. This API will help you get what you are looking for.