How to track hotel prices and rate parity

Fetch each hotel's Booking.com, Expedia and brand website pages for the dates you care about, on a schedule, and store each room's rate with its taxes and terms. The hard part is getting the pages, because booking sites block most scrapers and Expedia and hotel websites load rates with JavaScript. The String Web Access API returned 97% of requests across 100 bot-protected sites in our September 2026 benchmark, the most of 16 providers, and every attempt on all 9 travel sites.

Fetch the hotel's Booking.com page with checkin, checkout, group_adults and selected_currency in the URL, and read the room table. Without dates, the page has no rates. For a whole city, the search results page lists each property's cheapest room and price; for New York on November 20, 2026, it reported 474 properties. Booking.com was the hardest hotel site in our September 2026 benchmark: 8 of the 15 other scraping APIs couldn't fetch it on every attempt. String fetched it on all 5.

Rate parity monitoring checks that a hotel's rate for the same room, dates and conditions is the same on its own website and on online travel agencies such as Booking.com and Expedia. Fetch all three for each stay date, map the rooms to one code, compare like for like (both before tax or both with tax), and alert when a site is lower than the hotel's own public rate. Keep member rates separate, since they are meant to undercut the public rate.

Booking.com hotel pages billed at String's premium fetch rate on our fetches, $3.00 per 1,000 successful requests on the Starter plan ($20 a month). Expedia and hyatt.com pages with a wait action billed at the browser standard rate, $1.50 per 1,000. On Growth ($100 a month) the rates are $2.00 and $1.00. Tracking 20 hotels for the next 30 nights, once a day, is 18,000 requests a month per site: $54 in usage on Booking.com and $27 on Expedia, on Starter. Structured extraction with jsonSchema adds a per-request fee that scales with page size. The first 5,000 standard requests are free, and failed requests aren't billed. See pricing.

Room rates on public booking pages are facts, and collecting public prices is the best-supported case in scraping law. Booking site terms of service often restrict automated access, and guest reviews carry personal data, so leave reviewer details out. Stay on public pages, keep your request rate reasonable, and check with your counsel. We go through the cases in Is it legal to scrape competitor prices?

Yes, String's Google Hotels integration returns the offers Google Hotels shows for a property, one per booking site, each with the nightly price, the total with taxes, free cancellation and a booking link. Use it to see which sites sell the room, then fetch those sites directly for room-level rates. See the Google Hotels integration docs.

Yes, String fetches the page from the country you set in countryCode. Set the currency in the URL too, such as Booking.com's selected_currency, so prices from different markets stay comparable.

Check for the rates, not the status code. Our plain fetches of the Expedia and hyatt.com rate pages came back as HTTP 200 with no room prices on them, because the rates load afterwards. Require the room list in your schema with minItems: 1, and see how to detect a bot block behind an HTTP 200. For airfares, see how to scrape flight prices.

Send us the URLs and we'll run them and show you what comes back before you commit. Ask for a free sample rate feed, or test them yourself with your first 5,000 free requests.