Does Booking.com Allow Scraping?
The short answer to this question is NO. But why? Well, there are many reasons why they do not support scraping. They have got millions of listings, and acquiring/managing this requires money – they wouldn’t do that and then provide the data for you free in other to use it to make money.
They do have a developer API you can use to collect data, but this paid, and most developers would run from doing this. Another reason is that web scraping generally does not add anything to the site you are scraping from – it only adds to their running cost. While scraping is not supported, it is still not illegal, but you will need to deal with Booking.com blocks.
Why Use Rotating Proxies for Scraping Booking?
You can decide to make use of dedicated proxies for scraping Booking, but that would mean having many IP addresses and rotating them. When it comes to scraping Booking, there are no two ways about it – IPs need to be rotated as Booking.com looks at the frequency of requests it gets from IPs and would block any further request from an IP if it gets too many requests from it.
To avoid this, you will need IP addresses rotated. While you can do that yourself using dedicated proxies, your workflow would be a lot easier if you make use of rotating proxies that do that automatically for you.
- Best proxies for scraping data from Tripadvisor and Agoda
- Get Best proxies for Asos, Costco, Groupon, and Target
Can I Use Free Proxies for Scraping Booking.com?
When it comes to accessing Booking.com, avoid the thinking that you can use free proxies. This is because Booking.com has one of the most effective systems of detecting and blocking proxies – your free proxies will most likely get discovered and blacklisted.
Aside from this, you are better off avoiding free proxies as they are slow, unreliable, can be insecure, and could break your privacy. Instead of using free proxies, there are affordable proxies in the market that you can use.