In my opinion, the issue when using Airbnb is not really to find the good one despite rigged scores, but more that there is usually no interesting offer at the good moment for interesting locations.

Reasonable ok ones are really expensive, overly expensive compared to going to a hotel, and affordable ones are all really crappy and so overly over expensive for their value.

I find it hard to see the advantage of scraping reviews versus just looking at the actual score.

Score is rigged, description does not match reality, negative reviews are deleted.

AI is perfect to answer questions like:

- is there a big table on pictures (proper workspace)

- is there a direct sea view

- any mentions of drain issues...

Only if you know what to ask.

You'll miss all the things you didn't ask about -- good and bad.

I find that the only thing that works with Airnbnb is just to read all the reviews after excluding anything that isn't close to a 5.0 rating. Some kinds of negative comments in reviews can safely be ignored (e.g. the people who rented an apartment in the middle of downtown and were surprised that it's noisy), but almost any substantial negative comment in any review should be a red flag, no matter how many positive reviews there are.

for both Booking and AirBnB make sure to read recent reviews. Booking especially likes to default to "relevant" reviews (which are always glowing reviews from five years ago)

This is very interesting, can you share a bit more about your methodology/setup?

Android app, USB dongle with HDMI capture card. Screenshot goes to OCR and LLM. There is a virtual USB HID mouse build on Arduino that clicks on links.

For more on this setup, see “Web Scraping Fundamentals” by Rube Goldberg.

Wouldn't it be easier to just interact directly with their web interface through an automated browser?

I prefer to scrape their Android app.

I tried this on another site and got blocked. You need to be aware of how bot detection works