How to Scrape Reviews From TripAdvisor Using an Application Programming Interface (API)
TripAdvisor reviews contain a lot of helpful information about flight and hotel prices that can help you boost your business. It’s also home to tons of useful stats about popular travel destinations, hotels, and restaurants.
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If you want to extract and use all of this data, you can use web scraping to automatically extract data from TripAdvisor reviews. Web scraping involves using automated bots to collect data from an HTML version of the site and deliver the collected data in Excel or CSV format, so you can process, analyze, and use the information.
As the most effective data collection method currently available, data scraping reviews from TripAdvisor will greatly boost your ability to synthesize, organize, and understand existing trends in the hospitality industry.
By using an application programming interface (API) or HTML module, you’ll be able to get the data you need smoothly and quickly. Read on to learn more about why TripAdvisor reviews are important, what scraping is, and how you can scrape reviews from TripAdvisor using an API or an HTML module. We’ll also walk you through how to use Scraping Robot’s API and HTML scraper.
Feel free to use the table of contents to skip to the section(s) that interest you the most.
Why TripAdvisor Reviews Are So Important
How many reviews are on TripAdvisor? As of 2020, TripAdvisor has over 884 million reviews of hotels, accommodations, and more.
This means that TripAdvisor reviews can tell us a lot about flights, facilities, experiences, and other things, which can help consumers:
- Get a better understanding of the most liked and most disliked tourist attractions in a particular area
- Obtain in-depth research about travel destinations
- Avoid common tourist mistakes or traps
- Discover new places, accommodations, and experiences
For instance, if you’re looking to get out of Seattle for a weekend, you can use scraping to discover which nearby city is the cheapest. Similarly, you can use scraping to spot and avoid common mistakes travelers often make when touring a particular area.
You should also consider looking through TripAdvisor reviews if you’re a travel and tourism company because it will help you:
- Understand your travel facility’s reputation and find room for improvement. Whether you’re running a tour of local wineries, a bed or breakfast, a motel, or a hotel, TripAdvisor review data will give you a sense of how the public sees your facility.
- Grasp the travel industry’s current trends and how you can catch up and stand out from your competitors.
How Can Scraping Help You Collect Data From TripAdvisor Reviews?
Scraping is the best way to access and use the massive amount of data contained in TripAdvisor reviews. A scraper will help you compile and transfer data into a spreadsheet for analysis and review.
Traditionally, you would have to go through each TripAdvisor review and manually input the different parameters into a spreadsheet. For example, when reading the TripAdvisor review below, you would note in your Excel sheet that:
- It’s a five-star review
- It was reviewed on February 5, 2020
- It was posted using a mobile phone
- The writer had visited this location in February 2020
- One person found this review helpful
With scraping, you won’t have to take such detailed notes for every review. With just a couple of clicks, you’ll be able to determine which reviews were considered helpful by others and narrow your search results to specific areas or facilities you’re looking for. For example, you can find the best deals for different rental properties by scraping for nightly rates. You can also scrape to filter reviews by date and author.
Scraping Reviews From TripAdvisor With an API
An API will allow you to scrape through web pages in real-time, instead of individually entering each page you want to scrape.
An API is a software interface that connects different computer programs and allows them to transfer data without exposing the code underlying each data transfer. By allowing data to be transferred from one software to another, an API will enable you to create a data funnel from your scraping software to the API to your data analytics software or database without any manual input.
APIs also allow you to extract and isolate categories of data so you don’t have to sift through a large amount of data in your database. This is how you can find your reviews on TripAdvisor and how you can get recent reviews on TripAdvisor. You can also use code to direct your API to send commands to your scraping software to extract specific categories of data from the pages you want, even when you aren’t at your computer. This will allow you to keep statistics on datasets that are always changing, such as stock market prices.
Additionally, APIs allow you to request data from web pages every 60 seconds, which you can then funnel into your own data projects, software, and other processes. Without an API, you would have to manually check up on these pages multiple times a day.
Although APIs seem complex, scraping TripAdvisor reviews with an API can be very simple.
Here’s how you can get started:
- Download and install your web scraping software. Make sure that you understand the software documentation before you install it. Note, however, that some APIs, like the Scraping Robot API, are browser-based and don’t need to be downloaded.
- Go to the web page you want to scrape.
- Copy the URL.
- Paste the URL into the program.
- You will then receive the full HTML output within seconds.
- Most web scraping tools have an extraction sequence for different HTML elements on a page. For instance, most scraping tools extract the text first. You can then select other extractable categories, such as Inner HTML, Class Attribute, JSON object, Captcha, href attribute, and full HTML. Available categories depend on what web scraping tool you’re using, so make sure that you got the right web scraping tool for what you want to achieve.
- Scraping Robot’s API simplifies this process by giving you all categories of HTML after you press the “run” button.
After receiving the full output, you can then export the data to your preferred analysis program, such as XLSTAT, Graphpad, and SPSS.
If you want to learn more about how Scraping Robot implemented the Scraping Robot API, check out our recent article.
How to Scrape TripAdvisor Reviews With an HTML Module
Although it’s highly recommended that you know how to code before using APIs, if you’re not a coder, you can still scrape TripAdvisor reviews using Scraping Robot’s pre-built HTML module.
To start scraping with this HTML module:
- Go to Scraping Robot’s HTML scraper, which will allow you to collect any kind of HTML data from any website.
- Copy the URL of the page you want to scrape and paste it into the URL field.
- Under the CSS selector field, paste in CSS selectors to look for elements to extract.
- Under the XPath field, paste in your XPath. XPath allows you to compute values or select notes from an HTML document. Play around with the XPath expressions to extract web data
- Press the “start scraping” button after checking off “I’m not a robot.” You should now get the HTML versions of the URLs you pasted in CSV format. Like Scraping Robot API, this HTML scraper allows you to collect any and all categories of HTML data.
- Download the CSV file or export it directly to your database.
If you want to scrape multiple pages, click the “add another row” button at the bottom to add up to 10 scrapes at a time. If you need more, you can sign up for a free trial.
Other Ways to Scrape TripAdvisor Reviews
If the above solutions aren’t working for you, feel free to submit custom work to us at Scraping Robot by scrolling down to the “Contact” section.
You can also reach out to us if you have an idea for a new module. We are always looking for new ways to develop and improve our products, and we have great faith in the creativity and ingenuity of our customers.
Conclusion
TripAdvisor reviews are a great starting point for consumers and companies alike. As a consumer, scraping reviews will help you plan the ideal trip and avoid common mistakes. If you’re a travel agency or facility, data pulled from TripAdvisor reviews will make you aware of what clients are looking for, so you can stand shoulder to shoulder with your competitors.
Although learning how to scrape reviews from TripAdvisor sounds difficult, it’s actually quite easy if you use Scraping Robot’s browser-based API and HTML Scraper. Most scraping tools collect different categories of HTML data and need to be downloaded, but Scraping Robot’s API and HTML Scraper allow you to collect any and all categories of HTML data from all kinds of websites and set up a data funnel to populate your database. Both tools will save you a lot of stress and help you to arrange, manipulate, and organize data.
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