airbnb-trip-planner

README

airbnb-trip-planner

A little script I wrote to make planning multi-leg trips with AirBnB a bit more tolerable.

Make data-driven decisions about your trip today!

... And use this script responsibly. Please.
You don't want to be single-handedly responsible for this tool disappearing, and/or bringing AirBnB down for everyone.

Requirements

• go, or docker installed in your path - See below for details
• An internet connection
• A configured 'trip file', e.g. my_trip.yml

Usage

I'm not going to tell you how exactly to extract a public API key from the main AirBnB site, nor am I going to provide a script that does this.
A bit of patience and digging around in a browser debugging tool should get you the result you want ;)

After you've got it, set it as the API_KEY environment variable.

... But aside from the above, this script can be run in one of two ways:

1. Call run/script from inside the repository; or
2. Run go run . (or go run *.go if you're on an older version of go.)

An example trip file and output CSV file are in the repository, and should give you a better idea of how things are set up.

Search area coordinates

The way this tool searches for properties is by a map rectangle - Which means that it has two sets of coordinates - One for the bottom-left corner of the rectangle (sw), and one for the upper-right (ne).
Why it's not nw and se is beyond me, but I digress.

You can get these coordinates by going to Google Maps, clicking on a location (note: not a location pin, or location heading), and copying and pasting the values that pop up at the bottom-centre of your screen. Repeat this process for the other corner of the 'rectangle', and plug them into the YAML file.

Environment Variables

This is kept fairly primitive, with the idea that everything should be managed from the YAML config file.

API_KEY (Required): This is an API key used to call certain parts of the AirBnB API when searching.
From what I can tell, this doesn't change often.

CONFIG_FILE (Optional): Handy if you've got different trips, or want to briefly test something out. Set this to the path to your config file.

VERBOSE / DEBUG (Optional): Outputs more information for debugging, and tracking down issues such as AirBnB rate-limiting this script.

Other Things

• The script doesn't leverage request concurrency when fetching data, to avoid completely overloading the AirBnB servers, and possibly subjecting users to IP-based throttling.
  It also doesn't write each listing to the file as it processes it, mainly because I didn't write the functionality for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

• All my historical commits are hidden in another repository, mainly because it runs a few automated tests, small data collection attempts, and accesses things on a local network.
  So this is more of a release repository than anything else.

Some Context

This is the result of a few months worth of hacking away in my spare time, borne from a desire to get a bit more information out of the AirBnB website.

There were things that I was willing to pay more for (for example, the ability to check myself in via a lockbox, or wireless internet). However, the AirBnB search experience only allows you to filter it out.

My last few trips I had planned by manually copying and pasting information into my Google Sheet, but then I realised - Why am I wasting time doing this when I can get a machine to do it for me!?

There were a few other minor things, like not being able to sort by price, and wanting to get certain insights into other parts of the data.

And most importantly, get that data as a CSV file so that I could import it into Google Sheets for further filtering and analysis :)