# Changelog of Booking.com Reviews Scraper — Hotel Guest Reviews & Ratings (`kestrel/booking-reviews-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/kestrel/booking-reviews-scraper/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/kestrel/booking-reviews-scraper.md

## Changelog

### 2026-08-30

- Reliability: a run that cannot act on its input — a URL from the wrong site, a name nothing resolves to, an empty target list, a number outside the documented range — now ends cleanly with the reason on the run card instead of as a failed run. Nothing is charged in either case; a blocked or throttled source still fails loudly.
- Store listing: moved into the categories buyers actually browse (the old `Business` category has no Store page).

### 1.0 — 2026-08-29

First release.

- Every guest review of any Booking.com property: the 1–10 score and the same score out of five, the title, what the guest liked and what they disliked (and both joined into one comment), the language it was written in, posting date, check-in and check-out dates, nights, room, traveller type, reviewer name and country, helpful votes, guest photos and the property's public reply.
- Three ways in: Booking.com hotel URLs, hotel names, or Booking's numeric hotel ids. URLs and names resolve through Booking's own autocomplete and the resolved name comes back in every row; a URL, its name and its id count as the same hotel and are harvested once.
- Order by most recent, oldest, highest rated, lowest rated or most relevant. Booking filters **server-side** by language, traveller type and keyword, so skipped reviews are never fetched or charged.
- Two cost controls that filter **before** billing: `maxRating` keeps only reviews at or below a score — and reads the property lowest score first, stopping at the threshold, so a complaints feed reads only the pages that carry complaints — and `requireText` drops score-only reviews (about four in ten on Booking). Filtered reviews are never charged.
- Free hotel row per property: name and location, Booking's seven category scores (staff, facilities, cleanliness, comfort, value, location, Wi-Fi), the review count and how many reviews each language, traveller type and season holds.
- Billing: pay per delivered review row. Hotel rows, status rows, filtered reviews, properties with no reviews and failed lookups are all free.
- Reliability: the actor never loads a Booking.com page (those sit behind a browser challenge); it calls the same review endpoint Booking's own review list uses, which answers plain requests on datacenter proxies. A refused or empty answer is retried on a fresh IP and, if it keeps failing, reported as an error rather than as "no reviews".