How can the travel industry benefit from data scraping?
The travel and tourism industry is a major contributor to the GDP of many countries worldwide. One particular example is the US. Foreign travel to the US is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that employs millions of Americans, and travel websites are among the most visited on the internet.
Data Scraping the travel industry provides unparalleled insight into this market enabling smarter investment decisions to steer businesses in the right direction.
It's not only in the US where scraping travel industry data can achieve this — wherever your tourism business is based, or if you operate internationally, travel data can help you to define and understand your target market in order to raise revenues.
Read on to find out more about travel industry data scraping and how Zyte's data extraction services can help you.
US tourism in numbers
For a better understanding of why travel industry data scraping has the potential to unleash unimaginable revenues, it's important to appreciate the scale of the domestic and international travel business.
According to the US Government's SelectUSA website, in 2017 US travel and tourism accounted for:
- $1.6 trillion of economic output and 7.8 million jobs
- 11% of all US exports and 32% of US services exports
- 2.8% of total US gross domestic product (GDP)
The US ranks third in the world in terms of visitor numbers, and the Department of Commerce expects 95.5 million annual international visitors by 2023, an increase of nearly 100% since the year 2000.
On the world stage, the US is the outright leader for international travel and tourism exports. In 2017, international visitors to the US spent more than $250 billion, generating a trade surplus of $77 billion.
Types of travel industry data
When we talk about travel data scraping, what types of data do we mean?
Our hotel data scraping services can be used to extract and compile in-depth travel industry data from hotel operators' websites, including:
- Amenities
- Availability
- Contact details
- Images
- Locations
- Maps
- Occupancy
- Reviews
- Room prices
- Room types
Similar data scraping reports can be customized to add any extra fields you need, and the extracted data is provided in a structured format, ready for deeper analysis.
Across the travel industry, many other types of data extraction can be carried out to benefit businesses, such as tracking the busiest transport routes and identifying specific areas and attractions as they rise in popularity.
How to apply data scraping in the travel industry
Once you have you gone through the process of data scraping the travel industry datasets you need, it's time to put it to work.
Business strategy
Business strategy works better when it's based on a true real-time understanding of your market. Travel data scraping gives you the information you need to enable this for your business.
Learning from customer insights, in particular, is important in a sector like travel and tourism, where you need to know which destinations, attractions, and activities are in demand.
Competitor analysis
Find your competitive edge by keeping a watchful eye on your closest rivals, or by tracking the big brands in the business to respond to their marketing activities.
Price tracking
One of the biggest benefits of tourism data scraping is the ability to track the prices people are paying for travel and leisure activities in real-time.
You not only gain insight into the value of your accommodation, attraction, or activity — crucially, you know that your estimated value is current, accurate, and based on what domestic and international visitors are prepared to pay.
Find out more
If you would like to know more about Zyte's services for travel data scraping and tourist accommodation providers, please read about our hotel data extraction service for an example of the kind of structured data report we can produce.
Remember, we can customize reports to contain the fields you need — and leave anything out if it's not relevant to achieving success for your business. That goes for travel businesses across the board and not only for accommodation providers.
For more general information about our approach to scraping website data (and why it matters to take compliance risks into account when planning a campaign), you can read more about Zyte data extraction here.