Nomad Airbnb: Airbnb advanced search for digital nomads using Scrapy

Intro

Airbnb's search is pretty good, but sometimes I find it lacking. For instance, you can't do a full text search, and they limit you to 300 results per search which means it is a chore to see their entire inventory.

Luckily, they make it easy by storing most of their listing data (i.e. "state") in big JSON objects at the bottom of the page in the content attribute of meta HTML tags.

Example Usage

NOTE: It's now necessary to render JavaScript in order to scrape Airbnb. Follow the instructions to install scrapy-splash here:

https://github.com/scrapy-plugins/scrapy-splash

You will need to ensure the JS engine is running before running the scrapy crawl command.

Minimal Usage:

scrapy crawl airbnb

Edit AirbnbSpider.py to configure `_query_parts`

Advanced command line options:

scrapy crawl airbnb \
    -a city=Madrid \
    -a country=Spain \
    -a check_in=10/04/2016 \
    -a check_out=11/01/2016 \
    -a max_price=1900 \
    -a min_price=1800 \
    -a neighborhoods="Acacias,Almagro,Arganzuela,Argüelles,Centro,Cortes,Embajadores,Imperial,Jerónimos,La Latina,Malasaña,Moncloa,Palacio,Recoletos,Retiro,Salamanca,Sol" \
    -s MUST_HAVE="(atico|attic|balcon|terra|patio|outdoor|roof|view)" \
    -s CANNOT_HAVE="studio" \
    -s MINIMUM_WEEKLY_DISCOUNT=20 \
    -s WEB_BROWSER="/usr/bin/chromium" \
    -o madrid.xlsx

Scraping Description

After running the above command, the scraper will start. It will first run the search query, then determine the quantity of result pages, and finally iterate through each of those, scraping each of the property listings on each page.

Scraped items (listings) will be passed to the default item pipeline, where, optionally, the description, name, summary, and reviews fields will be filtered using either or both of the CANNOT_HAVE and MUST_HAVE regexes. Filtered items will be dropped. Accepted items can be optionally opened in a given web browser, so that you can easily view your search results.

Finally, the output can be saved to an xlsx format file for additional filtering, sorting, and inspection.

Parameters

You can find the values for these by first doing a search manually on the Airbnb site.

city, state: City and State to search. (required)
check_in, check_out: Check-in and Check-out dates. (required)
min_price, max_price: Minimum and maximum price for the period. (required)
The Airbnb search algorithm seems to scale this based upon search length. So it will be either the daily or monthly price, depending on the length of the stay.
neighborhoods: Comma-separated list of neighborhoods within the city to filter for. (optional)
output: Name of output file. Only xlsx output is tested. (optional)

Settings

These settings can be edited in the settings.py file, or appended to the command line using the -s flag as in the example above.

CANNOT_HAVE="<cannot-have-regex>"
Don't accept listings that match the given regex pattern. (optional)
FIELDS_TO_EXPORT=['field1', 'field2', ...]
Can be found in settings.py. Contains a list of all possible fields to export, i.e. all fields of AirbnbScraperItem. Comment items to remove undesired fields from output.
MINIMUM_MONTHLY_DISCOUNT=30
Minimum monthly discount. (optional)
MINIMUM_WEEKLY_DISCOUNT=25
Minimum weekly discount. (optional)
MUST_HAVE="(<must-have-regex>)"
Only accept listings that match the given regex pattern. (optional)
WEB_BROWSER="/path/to/browser %s"
Web browser executable command. (optional)

Examples:
- MacOS
  WEB_BROWSER="open -a /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app"
- Windows
  WEB_BROWSER="C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"
- Linux
  WEB_BROWSER="/usr/bin/google-chrome"

Requirements

Credits

This project was originally inspired by this excellent blog post by Luca Verginer.

alaminshakeel/airbnb_scraper