Hi
cruser1 , interesting in graph form, though let's look at step 1 "scraping" / grabbing data.
1. How / where to find the data (daily rate, by room type)?
a. IHG is the only major loyalty program that does not , at start of booking, have Flexible Dates / show Calendar View of Rates. Booking [dot] com displays monthly view, so they must be grabbing / scraping the data. [IHG . for the Mr&Mrs Smith properties did display Calendar of blank (available) and grey (not available) but no rates -- rather useless as needed to click each blank date to see the rate. Recent (mid-autumn 2023), for some/all brands, if hotel is totally booked for a specific date, a click box appears asking if want to see available dates ...but this should be available at start of booking.
b. Hilton has a map of properties which displays either a) Rate or b) Points, and can choose a single currency eg. USD, and values appear quite quickly as scroll across world
So, manually with eyes, can see lowest rate or points, during specific date or within next months, for a particular city / country / region / world . Though it's only for Standard Room, best or single date, and manual, it gives an idea of properties with low points/money rates. .
2. How to specify room type other than Standard? Perhaps Standard and Suite are the only types?
3. Are you able to grab/scrape the incremental cost to purchase 5,000 points when booking BFR (Best Flexible Rate) ?
Two items to identify / scrape: a) only properties offering option to purchase 5k (not 3k,2k,1k) . Generally these are IC, Indigo, sometimes Crowne. some Voco's, a few Holiday Inns
b) the additional cost. For example, in 2022 the IC Warsaw could purchase 5k Points per night for $9 (and ofc add the amount to move from Advance Purchase Rate up to BFR) , but in 2023 same property, the cost for 5k points per night is $50 or $99
By manual process over past couple years, have an idea of which properties offer 5k Points and lowest additional cost
Originally Posted by
cruser1
Lennys26v2 and
HEOH - Probably not what you want to hear, but the chart was generated with Splunk. I scrape hotel and flight data for some cities that I'm always interested in visiting and output / chart that data with HTML and a traditional JavaScript charting engine, but I also use Splunk for cities and flights that I'd like to watch for a while, but I'm not as interested in. I don't want to invest the time to hard-code something that would display the data, so I use Splunk.
I realize Splunk is usually for displaying server logs and machine generated data, but I use it at work for that and I'm used to seeing and using it, so I have my scraping scripts output into CSV format which free Splunk on my VPS then consumes. It makes it easy to add or remove stuff as my interests change! I just have to make sure my data never exceeds 500MB per day since that's the maximum amount of data the free version of Splunk will consume in a day.
Sorry for going off-topic! Just thought I'd explain why I was doing something unconventional.
To get back on track discussing deals - if you want some value for your IHG points, you can get over 15 cents per point in value by booking a night at the Intercontinental in Athens from Sept 21 - 22. The Presidential Suite is the only room available with cash at over 6,100 EUR + tax, but you can reserve a standard room for 40k IHG points.
