If you want to scrape Airbnb data for personal or business needs, you will need a reliable proxy. Before we explain everything about scraping Airbnb with a proxy, let’s first see what Airbnb and proxy servers are.
With more than 4 million hosts accommodating more than 800 million guests in more than 80,000 cities across the globe, Airbnb is one of the largest accommodation platforms in the world. Its popularity has increased so much that it’s now considered the world’s largest “hotel chain.”
The platform was created in 2007 by two people who decided to share their space in San Francisco with three travellers. Today, the platform connects people who want to rent their places with travellers looking for a place to stay. This means Airbnb doesn’t own any property but only provides a place where hosts and guests can find and help each other easily and safely.
Guests love it because the accommodations are cheaper and homier than hotels and hostels and for getting a chance to connect with the local people. Hosts love it because of the autonomy and convenience it provides. The success of Airbnb has inspired many others to start similar apartment booking websites.
Now that you’re more familiar with Airbnb, though the chances are you’ve already used it, let’s see what proxies are.
Proxies or proxy servers are tools that let you browse the net more anonymously. They are essentially servers that connect you to websites and apps on your behalf. Proxies use another IP address to connect you to the server on the net you want to access.
When using a proxy, you send your requests to it before they go any further. The proxy replaces your IP and other data with its own before sending each request to its destination. The response you get from the internet also goes to the proxy first before it sends them to you.
This simple feature helps you stay anonymous and appear “invisible” to the rest of the internet.
Proxies provide online anonymity, but why would you want to access Airbnb anonymously? The answer is – to scrape its data. So, let’s learn more about scraping Airbnb before going into the topic of proxies.
Whether you want to find the perfect accommodation for your trip, or you wonder if renting out your place for the next tourist season would pay off, scraping Airbnb listings will help you a lot.
Without scrapers or bots, you’d have to copy and paste massive amounts of Airbnb data and compare it in an Excel sheet. However, the whole process will take you weeks or even months to complete, considering the hundreds or thousands of listings available on the site for every corner of the world.
A much easier and quicker way to get the data you need is to use web scrapers. These automation tools, also known as bots, can extract and sort the desired information for you in a matter of seconds or minutes.
Once you have the information you need, you can use it to find the perfect accommodation for your needs and budget. If you’re a host or consider becoming one, you can use the data to research the market, see if it pays off to rent out your property, or come up with new ideas to attract more tourists. Airbnb competitors can scrape its data for business needs.
No matter the reason for scraping Airbnb data, you’d need another tool to make it happen – a reliable proxy server. Basically, Airbnb doesn’t allow web scraping or bots, so you risk getting blocked or blacklisted if you scrape its site. Bots can easily be detected by site servers as they send requests a lot faster than humans. Luckily, a proxy server can help you avoid this and harvest the information you need without worrying about account or IP bans.
A reliable proxy provider can give you plenty of IP addresses that can rotate and make your scraping traffic look like it’s coming from countless real users instead of a single bot. This way, Airbnb won’t see that all those requests are coming from a single IP address and therefore avoid flagging you for suspicious activity.
In a nutshell, using plenty of reliable proxies to scrape Airbnb will prevent you from being detected and banned by the site servers.
The best proxies for Airbnb are rotating residential proxies from a reliable proxy provider. These are IP addresses from real devices with genuine ISP connections that rotate automatically or at set intervals, allowing you to scrape any website without worrying about it blocking your account or IP.
We provide thousands of highly secure and anonymous rotating residential proxies from almost every country in the world. This makes us a great premium proxy provider for scraping Airbnb and other large data sources.
