Comparison of the hotel booking platforms Booking and Agoda

Basic information:

• Author: Sergi Portolés
• Project II: Ironhack Data Analyst Bootcamp (pipelines)
• Results might be incorporated in the website Sapore di Cina

Sources:

Source	Type	Data extracted
Agoda Partners Portal	CSV file1	Information of all hotels offered in the portal
Booking	Web Scrapping	Number of hotels offered in a country, city or region
Bing	Web Scrapping	Seacrh for Booking URL for a certain city
Rest Countries	API	ISO codes and names of the countries

¹ File not provided in the repo

Python libraries used:

Library	Use
Pandas	Data Frame manipulation
Seaborn	Visualization
Matplotlib	Visualization
Responses	HTTP Calls
Bs4 (BeautifulSoup)	HTML manipulation
Geopandas	Country map visualization
Unidecode	encode to UTF8 cities names

Background:

• Booking.com headquarters are located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
• Agoda headquarters are located in Singapore
• Currently Agoda is a currently a subsidiary of Booking Holdings.

Objective of the study

• Compare the hotel booking platforms Booking and Agoda

Limitations of the study

• The impossibility to access to the Booking.com official data (API or Database) have forced to use web scrapping, this method might under-represent the number of hotels and locations for this platform
• This is a quantitative (number of hotels) not qualitative (prices) due to the lack of easy access to Booking.com data.
• The number of hotels are not filtered by type of accomodation and include hotels, apartments, villas and other types, again accessing booking source data is needed to filter the type of accomodation

Results

Total Number of Hotels Globally

Total Number of Hotels by Region

Top Countries in Booking with more Hotels

Top Countries in Agoda with more Hotels

Asia

Taiwan

Thailand

China

Europe

Croatia

Spain

Results:

• Booking has a more significant number of hotels listed globally
• Booking has more hotels listed in all regions except in Asia
• The region with most hotels listed in Booking is Europe where the headquarters are localized
• The region with more hotels listed in Agoda is Asia where the headquarters are localized
• Created an application to compare Agoda and Booking total number of hotels in any country by cities and plot the results geographically

Future Improvements:

• Plotting functions need some minor adjustments
• Geolocation of the cities need to be adjusted with an external service (API)
• Scrapping method need some minor adjustments to avoid some missing data.