# Changelog of Hostelworld Reviews Scraper — Hostel Guest Reviews (`kestrel/hostelworld-reviews-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/kestrel/hostelworld-reviews-scraper/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/kestrel/hostelworld-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 Hostelworld review of a hostel as structured rows: the 0-100 overall score, the seven sub-scores behind it (value, safety, location, staff, atmosphere, cleanliness, facilities), the same score on the 0-5 scale, the text, the language and machine-translation flag, the hostel's public reply, the group type, age band and trip types of the guest, and their nickname, nationality and review count.
- Hostels by Hostelworld URL (both the `/hostels/p/<id>/…` and the older `hosteldetails.php` form) or by bare property id. Every URL form carries the id, so resolution costs no request; a URL without one falls back to reading the page once.
- Filters that run **before billing**: `minRating` and `maxRating` on the 0-100 overall, `groupTypes`, `sinceDate` (relative dates for schedules; paging stops once a whole page predates it in newest-first order), `requireText`.
- Four review orders, and only the four the API really honours: newest first, oldest first, lowest rated first, highest rated first. Anything else is silently served as newest first, so the input is an enum.
- A free hostel row per property: type, star rating, city, country, region, address, coordinates, aggregate 0-100 ratings, total ratings, facilities, what it is best for, lowest nightly price, and the solo/couple/group split of its reviewers.
- Reads Hostelworld's own public JSON API over Apify's datacenter proxy — no key, no login, no browser, no `Origin` header. A hostel with no reviews is reported as `no_reviews` with `total: 0`, an unknown or deactivated id as `not_found`, and a refusal as an error; the API has no silent-empty answer and neither does the actor.
- Pay per review row; hostel rows, status rows, duplicate targets, unknown ids and filtered reviews are free.