Scrape Airbnb Data
If you’re wondering how to get Airbnb data like so many other research projects and services offer, we’ll walk you through a few options for Airbnb data scraping using the Air Bnb API found from its public website that contains structured data behind vacation rental homes & short term rentals listed on the Airbnb website.
LEGALLY Scrape Airbnb Listings
If you need truly unique or micro-targeted Airbnb data, then we’ll discuss below how to legally record web traffic from Airbnb APIs with our HAR File Scraper so that you can download scraped data from Airbnb after browsing it normally (in accordance with the Airbnb Terms of Service).
Check out this video for step-by-step instructions, or see the instructions below.
Run a Search on Airbnb’s Website
Simply head to the official Airbnb Website in your browser (we suggest using Google Chrome), and then enter some initial search criteria. We suggest you enter in a location (pick anywhere in the world) and specify the stay dates to retrieve accurate pricing data. This is because Airbnb will only show the TOTAL price of a stay and not show the average nightly price, so to be sure you’re comparing listing prices properly, make sure to specify check in and out dates.
Then before hitting the Search button, right click somewhere else on the page and select “Inspect” to open up developer tools (this will allow you to LEGALLY intercept the web traffic with the listings data). Once you see the developer tools open in your browser, hit Search.
Now scroll down and keep hitting the “Next” arrow until you go through all of the listings - you should see a maximium of 15 pages per search. While annoying, it is the only LEGAL way to access Airbnb’s data (manually) without violating the Terms of Service.
Export & Parse the HAR File
Once you’ve browsed through all the listings, click the “Network” tab in Developer Tools and then click the Down Arrow ⬇️ labeled “Export HAR…” and save the file to your computer. Then upload the HAR file to our HAR File Web Scraper and click the “Parse Group” button next to the group labeled with /api/v3/StaysSearch - this should be the first one.
On the next page, look for the collection labeled data › presentation › explore › sections › sectionIndependentData › staysMapSearch › mapSearchResults (should be the 2nd one), and this will contain the raw data for the listings shown on the search page. You can browse the columns or download the data as a CSV for analysis.
Airbnb Listing Details & Reviews
If you have a specific listing in mind (or small amount, say your own properties), you can scrape the listing details, reviews, etc… by navigating to the listing on Airbnb and scrolling through the relevant data (like reviews) while recording your web traffic. Export the data to a HAR file and upload to our scraper to see what you can extract.
Airbnb Experiences API
Another popular request is to scrape the Airbnb experiences and Points of Interest data for specific cities. Check out this video where we demonstrate how to do this using our HAR File Web Scraper:
Airbnb Open Data
One great example of using scraped Airbnb data is the Inside Airbnb Project, which releases free Airbnb data downloads for major markets like New York City. The data is a bit stale though, only updated a few times per year and is restricted to the cities offered, but may be a good starting point and much safer alternative to Airbnb web scraping. While it’s not the same as an Airbnb API for free, you can check it out and download Airbnb CSV files to see what it offers before considering scraping the data yourself!
Partner Airbnb API Access
If you’re looking for an official Airbnb developer API to scrape listings data (which would be very nice) or Airbnb API documentation, we have some bad news. The only official API that Airbnb offers is its highly restrictive Partner API, which is not taking applications and requires an invite to join or Airbnb affiliation.
Therefore, access to the Airbnb SDK for building your own Airbnb integration - like being able to click import calendars, see user transaction histories will not be possible without this sort of Airbnb API for developers, Airbnb API docs or some sort of Airbnb Open API.
Airbnb Unofficial API [NOT RECOMMENDED]
IMPORTANT - Much of the work on “unofficial” Airbnb APIs no longer works and/or has been prohibited in the Airbnb Terms of Service & robots.txt. While you are free to browse the following for informational purposes, we do not suggest following it and do not support any of the following at all.
However, if you really need an Airbnb API integration and don’t have an affiliation with Airbnb, there are some hacky ways to access authorized user-data via the Airbnb REST API (or Airbnb public API) used to send data to your web browser. Since this is an unofficial API used to power the official Airbnb website, it is subject to change at any time.
We only suggest considering the following if you need to build a non-production facing prototype to demonstrate an idea, such as if you need Airbnb calendar API or Airbnb booking API connections to your own app to synchronize dates, reservations, etc… These may also be useful for building an Airbnb crawler from the Airbnb API data or an API for Airbnb rental property management.
Otherwise, it’s worth waiting on access to the API via the official partner program.
Unofficial Airbnb Python APIs
The following libraries are based off of the unofficial Airbnb mentioned above. In addition to being able to log in via your own Airbnb account (generating an Airbnb API key), you can use the Airbnb scraper Python module for example to collect listing data. You may also want to check the docs first for Airbnb API examples before going too deep into these.
However please be sure to read the disclaimers in the GitHub repo and understand that you’re doing so at your own risk and we do NOT endorse the use of these libraries!
