Booking Reviews Scraper

This changelog summarizes all changes of the Booking actors provided by the Voyager organization. The specific actors that are affected are listed for each change.

2024-12-05

Breaking changes: Features ('booking-reviews')

• Completely reworked the scraper to extract new data points in more detail. List of the most important changes:
  • Reviewer's stay dates under the new checkInDate and checkOutDate fields
  • Review posted date up to seconds under reviewDate field
  • Room ID under stayRoomId field
  • Number of helpful votes under helpfulVotes field
  • Review category data like totalCategoryReviews and hotelRatingScores

Fixes ('booking-reviews')

• Fixed blocking issues for specific users

2024-11-29

Fixes ('booking-scraper')

• Fixed detection for removed stay dates for hotels with no available rooms

2024-11-27

Fixes ('booking-scraper')

• Added detection for removed stay dates as a form of blocking from Booking - the requests will be retried
• Fixed blocking issues initial page loads at the start of the runs

2024-11-08

Fixes ('booking-scraper')

• Fixed blocking issues for hotel detail pages with different language and currency settings

2024-10-12

Fixes ('booking-scraper')

• Fixed extraction of hotel facilities (facilities output field)

2024-08-26

Features ('booking-scraper')

• Added extraction of breadcrumbs under the new breadcrumbs field
  • Each breadcrumb object has the following fields: name, fullName, link (primary URL) and altLink (alternative URL)

2024-08-23

Features ('booking-scraper')

• Added extraction of room cancellation policies
  • New output fields cancellationType and freeCancellation available under rooms[i].options[j]

2024-08-12

Fixes ('booking-scraper')

• Fixed extraction of property description

2024-07-21

Features ('booking-scraper')

• Added extraction of host data under the new hostInfo field

2024-07-20

Fixes ('booking-scraper')

• Results were occasionally extracted in an incorrect language (not respecting the input configuration).

2024-07-01

Features ('booking-scraper', 'fast-booking-scraper')

• Added support for region search URLs such as:
  • https://www.booking.com/region/es/tenerife-island.cs.html
  • https://www.booking.com/searchresults.cs.html?region=5765

2024-07-01

Features ('booking-scraper')

• Added extraction of license data under the new licenseInfo field

2024-06-06

Features ('booking-scraper', 'fast-booking-scraper')

• Added support for startUrls with geo coordinates (latitude + longitude), such as:
  • https://www.booking.com/searchresults.html?dest_type=latlong&latitude=9.49777239589238&longitude=76.3387864375036
  • https://www.booking.com/searchresults.html?dest_type=latlong;latitude=25.9798617990057;longitude=-80.117758901886

2024-04-01

Features ('booking-scraper', 'fast-booking-scraper')

• Added support for inputted hotel search URLs parameter filters. The URL filters will now be respected and applied to the search.
  • Filters like "Parking", "Breakfast included", "Less than 1 km from city center", etc. are now supported.

2024-03-23

Fixes ('booking-scraper', 'fast-booking-scraper')

• Fixed crawling of destination search page to match Booking's results.

2024-03-18

Fixes ('booking-scraper')

• Fixed extraction of hotel's rooms due to Booking's redirection blocking.

Fixes ('fast-booking-scraper')

• Fixed price extraction decimal point issue.

2024-03-12

Features ('booking-scraper')

• Added extraction of hotel's rooms left count under the new [room].roomsLeft field.

2024-03-11

Fixes ('booking-scraper', 'fast-booking-scraper')

• Fixed number of results scraped and crawled for hotel search pages. This was caused by an update on Booking.

2024-02-25

Features ('booking-scraper', 'fast-booking-scraper')

• Added flexible stay duration input option field - flexWindow
• Added extraction of the picked stay dates

2024-02-20

Features ('booking-scraper')

• Added extraction of rooms images. You can find them under the new roomImages field.
• Added extraction of room IDs. See the new [room].id field.
• Improve hotel rooms beds data extraction into a more detailed and structured format
  • Breaking: updated the field name from [room].bedType to [room].bedType*s*

2024-01-10

Features ('booking-scraper', 'fast-booking-scraper')

• Significantly improved the performance and speed of scraping.

Fixes

• Fixed input options like 'language' and 'currency' not being respected for shared MyWishlist URLs.

2023-12-09

Features

• Added review ratings distributions - reviewScoresDistribution (booking-scraper, fast-booking-scraper)

2023-11-27

Features

• Added back the 'overcome 1000 results limit' feature, to activate when the maxItems limit is set above 1000 (booking-scraper, fast-booking-scraper)
• Added full input parsing and validation - might potentially break incorrect inputs (booking-scraper, fast-booking-scraper)

Fixes

• Fixed last page detection for certain page formats (booking-scraper, fast-booking-scraper)

2023-11-24

Features

• Added hotel chain/brand extraction under the hotelChain output field (booking-scraper)

2023-10-25

Features

• Added time of scrape to each extracted place under the timeOfScrapeISO field (booking-scraper, fast-booking-scraper)
  • The format is in the ISO 8601 format, i.e. 2023-10-25T12:00:00.000Z (GMT/UTC+0)

2023-10-21

Features

• Added hotel facilities extraction under the facilities field (booking-scraper)

2023-10-06

Fixes

• Fixed parsing of inputted hotel start URLs, which was causing the scraper to fail

2023-08-10

Fixes

• Fixed hotel stars extraction
• Fixed place type extraction
• Fixed "Get more than 1000 results" functionality
• Fixed hotel extraction when simple: true
• Fixed timeout on new pages - actor should run faster now
• Fixed price range input filter

Features

• Added relative dates for check-in and check-out fields (relative to the run's start date)
  • i.e. "1 day", "2 weeks", "6 months"
  • note: can only be used in JSON input
• Updated duplicate place detectors from name to place url
  • Places with identical names are now scraped properly
• Reworked "Get more than 1000 results" with price ranges and location filters
  • Price ranges activate when both checkIn and checkOut dates are specified (can be relative)
  • Location filters are default (they are not as accurate as price ranges though)

Deprecations

• useFilters field was deprecated, update your input with new field overcomeResultsLimit (Get more than 1000 results)
  • useFilters will still work for now

2023-04-05

• Handle shared URLs

2023-02-16

• Fixed issue with stars extraction

2023-01-30

• Fixed issue with category reviews extraction
• Add Resorts option to property types

2023-01-27

• Fixed issue with reviews extraction

2023-01-17

• Rewrite the scraper to Crawlee
• Fixed issue extracting renderedCurrency from the website

2023-01-16

• Fixed issue where validation fails because selected_currency is not present in the url

2023-01-04

• Fixed issue where 'reviews' are not scraped correctly when simple: true

2022-12-04

• Fixed missing months in review dates

2022-11-30

• Fixed missing prices and malformed price format

2022-11-29

• Fixed filter parameters in the search URL (propertyType and minMaxPrice)

2022-11-25

• Fixed incorrect currencies in the output - request retries

2022-11-23

• Added support for Booking-generated shared list of properties

2022-10-27

• Excluded rating: null results from the output if minScore is set

2022-10-12

• Removed preview reviews extraction - all reviews are now extracted from separate pages.
• Decreased timeout error rate by increasing timeout seconds, enabling browser fingerprinting and limiting max concurrency.

2022-06-27

• Fixed image extraction from listing page (for simple: true scrape parameter)
• Added the possibility to combine useFilters (circumventing Booking's limit of 1000 results) with scrape filters on property type (hotels, apartments, etc.) or price range

2022-04-03

• Added user reviews extraction from both detail page and reviews pagination pages
• Added category reviews extraction from detail page
• Removed default settings minScore = 8.4
• Fixed language settings for detail page (language input field was not respected)
• Fixed stars extraction from detail page
• Fixed checkInFrom and checkInTo extraction from detail page
• Handled global state with external package apify-global-store
• Split code into more source files, created extraction and routes folders

2022-01-10

• Fixed rejection of current date in checkIn and checkOut fields

2021-12-28

• Set custom minMaxPrice filter to provide more specific filtering than booking.com API
• Added rooms scraping support without checkIn and checkOut set (simple output with basic info only)
• Implemented useFilters to overcome 1000 results limit by setting filters one by one and combining them
• Refactored handlePageFunction

2021-11-22

• Fixed broken url search
• Fixed outdated selectors to scrape more detailed info
• Fixed minMaxPrice search filter
• Maximized results count when maxPages is set (included minScore and priceRange into search url)
• Prevented infinite run when no maxPages restriction is set

2021-08-24

• Extracted all images

2021-01-22

Features:

• Added screenshots for errors
• Added SessionPool

Fixes:

• Removed broken currency check (the main bug that prevented the scraper to work)
• Fixed scraper getting into infinite error loop
• Major code refactor (will help with future fixes and UX)