All organizations need to be competitive and successful in their respective industries, and scraping publicly available data may help them do so. Staying competitive requires using the proper data to analyze your approach and market position. This is particularly true for e-commerce businesses, but it also applies to other industries including hotels, market research, human resources, and real estate.
The hospitality sector, which includes hotels and a variety of other service-related businesses, has reached its pinnacle of expansion. According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), there were 1,322 million foreign visitor arrivals globally in 2017. In 2017, this number climbed by 7%, marking the best performance in the previous seven years. The travel sector is among the most powerful in the world right now. Data crawling and web harvesting may help the hotel business in a variety of ways, and this post was written to address all of your questions regarding data crawling for hotel marketing.
Scraping Hotel Related Data
Data extraction may be used by hotel comparison websites for a variety of purposes. There is a vast list of data that such organizations can gather and evaluate afterward for hotel marketing purposes. Following are some examples:
- Name of the hotel, address, city, country, and zip code
- Information on hotels depending on their kind and category
- Types of rooms, hotel amenities, and occupancy
- The hotel’s star rating
- Name and phone number of contact person, email, website, and fax number
- Different booking websites include information on unique trip packages.
- Client evaluations and comments from booking websites are used to determine the rating.
- The pricing range of the rooms as well as all of the hotel’s services
- Holiday discounts, as well as special promos
- The hotel accepts the following payment methods:
- Various hotel and hotel comparison websites utilize different images and photographs.
Essentially, everything on the website may be taken and utilized for a variety of reasons. The hotel’s official websites can be scraped for this information. However, there are several booking services accessible now that include all of the hotel information. TripAdvisor.com, Booking.com, Trivago.com, Expedia.com, and Travelocity.com are examples of such websites.
You’ll be able to stay competitive, discover patterns, and do a lot more with so much data on your competitor’s. The quantity of information offered by hotel comparison websites determines its relevancy and use to users. More data equals more comparisons, which means better results for website visitors.
Methods of Using Web Scraping for Hotel Marketing
If done correctly, web scraping may be quite beneficial. Consider the following straightforward applications of web scraping for the hotel industry.
Brand Management
Staying competitive requires brand management, which involves monitoring web sites to obtain information on what people are saying about you and your rivals.
Such data collecting is always advantageous to the company’s growth. You will receive information into what may be improved in your hotel administration by considering the reviews. Customer satisfaction and sales figures are linked, so pay attention to what people are saying about you online.
Developing Data Warehouse
Create your own data warehouse by scraping information such as photos, prices, customer information, and other details via data extraction. The information may then be evaluated and used as needed.
Pricing Competitiveness
You may track stock availability and price variations in your sector using data extraction. Staying on top of the list means keeping an eye on your direct rivals’ costs. Additionally, staying current on their deals can help you stay competitive. E-commerce requires you to sell your service at a competitive price all of the time. As a result, hotel comparison services rely largely on price scraping to keep current.
Detect Spam Reviews
Reviews left by the clients are one of the most important opinion-makers for the potential customers. Some 88% of consumers say that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. However, there are currently many fake reviews on the portals that are intended to mislead the readers. Spotting the opinion spamming, which is, in fact, illegal, plays an important role in your reputation. Using web scraping service for crawling the reviews will help to detect the fake ones and block them.
Better-Targeted Advertisements
The web harvesting service can monitor not just reviews and activities on your website, as well as the individuals who are responsible for them. Data harvesting can be used to determine demographic information about the audience, such as gender, age, employment, and geography. This information may be used to your company’s benefit. The attitudes and behavioral analytic data will aid in better understanding your users. As a result, you’ll be able to produce more specialized and narrowly focused advertising that is more appealing and effective.
How Web Scraping Hotel Data Will Boost Your Hotel Business?
Data crawling and extraction via web scraping services might be highly beneficial to your hotel business. You can examine the data for specific requirements after you get it in your chosen format. Using data correctly will eventually help you stay ahead of the competition and improve your hotel marketing efforts.
Lead Generation
Collecting information is the most critical necessity for lead creation. Any firm that wants to generate high-quality leads requires current and trustworthy information about each potential lead. The more data you collect, the more likely you are to have a collection of actionable leads. The four phases of web scraping for sales lead generation are as follows:
Sourcing: Establish your target audience and the sources from which you’ll gather information about them.
Extraction: It is the process of retrieving unstructured data for subsequent processing.
Cleaning: Identify and remove incorrect data.
Arranging: Organizing, formatting, and structuring data to make it organized and suitable for future analysis.
There are several methods for scraping information on potential hotel leads. Consider scraping data from the web, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses. You may also make your life simpler by purchasing ready-to-use data from a web scraping provider. Another, more time-consuming option is to personally collect data and mix it with social media, where you may locate your target audience and industry influencers. When you have high-quality, up-to-date data, you can utilize it to contact your potential leads.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is a crucial component in guiding your organization to success and greatness. It is a driving force that keeps you informed about industry developments. Data from competitors can be quite useful. You may use this information to design your pricing and promotions. It may also be used to study your competition’s strengths and weaknesses and develop relevant plans to help you succeed.
Consider the following important aspects to keep an eye on:
SEO Strategy: Whether you provide hotel services or not, your marketing efforts must be focused on the online platform as well. The internet will be the first place your potential clients turn to learn about the value you provide. Examining your rivals’ SEO approach will help you identify the most popular keywords, backlinks, and landing pages. Gathering this information and doing a thorough analysis will undoubtedly assist you in developing a more effective SEO plan.
Price Strategy: Keeping track of your competitors’ price is quite beneficial. Web scraping allows you to stay relevant and use real-time prices. It will supply you with data that will allow you to gain insight into your rivals’ product pricing tactics.
You’ll be able to recognize the technique utilized if you gather prices data regularly when your competitors’ prices fluctuate? How frequently do they do this? Is there a particular link or pattern? When you study the data, you’ll find answers to all of these questions. You can get ahead of your competition if you understand their pricing approach. You’ll be aware of when and how their rates change, and you’ll be able to take advantage of it.
Latest Updates: Trendspotting is crucial, as is keeping track of them and gathering data on what’s going on. It will assist in gaining a better knowledge of the market’s potential prospects and difficulties. You may develop plans that go beyond what’s happening in the industry by understanding such data. The promotion of your hotel will be fierce.
Quality Assurance
Data collecting is an extremely useful tool for analyzing the industry. It shouldn’t, however, be restricted to only competitive analysis. You may utilize a web scraping service to get information about your own company. One of the most important applications of data crawling is to organize the information about your firm that is currently available. Improving your existing data will assist you in being more organized and reducing the likelihood of problems.
Self-audit may be used on more than just your current internal data. You may also utilize web scraping to obtain information about your organization from customer reviews and comments. Examine customer feedback, hotel comparison website reviews, and social media comments. Take into account both the good and negative feedback to determine your strengths and limitations.
Business Intelligence
The word “business intelligence” refers to a technology-driven method of delivering actionable data based on data analysis. The goal is to deliver this data to managers and executives so that they may make more educated business decisions.
Web scraping can assist in gathering all of the data. Data sources are divided into two categories:
- Internal data is gathered from your hotel’s sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and other departments. Transforming this raw data into useful information will aid in decision-making and the determination of revenue and profit.
- External data is information from outside your hotel business. This refers to the information we’ve already discussed, such as competition information and feedback from all online platforms.
In your business intelligence, data crawling is critical. Business intelligence may help you boost your hotel marketing efforts by providing fresh insights based on relevant data.
Conclusion
Web scraping provides several benefits for your hotel business. Data crawling and extraction are low-cost, simple to implement, and extremely helpful. Outsourcing the task to a third-party organization is one alternative. You will save a lot of time this way. Your marketers will be able to spend more time evaluating data if they have access to current and high-quality data.
Web scraping makes the most of your most limited yet crucial resources: time, money, and team. It assists in the extraction of unstructured data from the internet and its transformation into structured data. This information is then provided in an easy-to-understand, interpret, and analyze style. It also aids in gaining knowledge about how to boost your hotel marketing and create actionable leads.
To stay competitive and profitable, use a web scraping tool to transform raw data into usable information.