Airbnb Hunter — find perfect apartments
TL;DR: a simple script to extract all listings from airbnb to a 3rd party page, then sort them by price/rating/number of reviews and find creme de la creme apartments in this area.
If you ever used Airbnb you probably noticed their filter and sorting system looks random and does not provide you with any controls.
There are multiple clues over the web why and how Airbnb sorting works, but it certainly doesn’t serve my needs.
Even though I prefer Airbnb to hotels for a long term stay, I always dread yet another apartment search. That’s why I wrote a simple script to fix this problem, and I’ve been using this script for my last 4 trips.
It is intentionally not a Chrome extension.
- Go to airbnb and search for a specific location, date, beds, and other filters you would set normally. Be as specific as possible, because narrowing down search at this point leaves less work for our parser.
- Move the map a little, ensure the URL now has ne_lng
- Open console and copy paste the script from http://sakurity.com/airbnb.js
Now you get a menu on top like this:
4. If you see “300+ places to stay” you need to set a price step in the first input. Why? Because Airbnb never gives you more than 301 apartments, even if it found 3000 apartments. Since we want to get all of them, we are going to parse in price increments. Set it your currency to USD and price step to something like $10 or $20. Leave it 0 if there are less than 300 apartments — we will parse them in one sweep.
5. Set price range, it is required
6. Click Parse and wait…
Now you can export 396 listings to our sort&filter HTML page. However if you still want to search in other neighborhood, you can move your map there and click Parse again. Repeat this procedure until you collect enough listings, then you can export.
Final step: once you click export JSON with all parsed listings will be sent to a 3rd party page at sakurity.com/airbnb.html, where you can sort by rating/reviews/price in any direction!
This page shows real price per night — including all cleaning and service fees.
Choose the cheapest apartment with most reviews, or book the most luxurious penthouse in the city — something you could never do with regular Airbnb filters (or actually lack thereof).
No private data is being extracted to airbnb.html but for security purposes, feel free to run it on localhost.
