We all love traveling and exploring our favorite destinations. Fortunately, it has become pretty convenient to plan a trip these days. From finding the best hotels to flight prices, every required data is available in one place. You don’t need to search at various places or visit multiple websites to book hotels, flight tickets, or look for price comparison at different sites. As a result, a lot of your precious time and energy needed for planning, scheduling, booking, and many other things are saved. You just need to go to travel aggregator websites to know your travel fare.
Travel aggregators save the hassle of searching different websites while estimating your travel fare to save on travel. They gather all the necessary information, price comparisons, etc. from various websites and make it available on a single platform. However, the question is how these travel aggregators accomplish such a time-taking and tedious task?
Travel fare aggregation is done with the help of proxies. Travel aggregators don’t collect the required data manually. They collect all the valuable data such as flight fare, hotel prices, cab charges, etc. from numerous web servers on a minute-to-minute basis. To achieve this, the travel aggregators carry out automatic web scraping using proxies.
In this article, we will closely look at how proxies are a must for travel fare aggregation. But before starting, let’s see what proxies are and how they help in web scraping.
What are Proxies?
Proxies or proxy servers are essential to bypass geo-restrictions and IP blocking. There are many reasons for which certain sites are restricted, and the location is one of them. For example, some Netflix shows are exclusively available for certain regions. In such a case, you cannot browse them in your region unless and until you use a proxy to bypass geo-restriction. At times, schools and administration all restrict certain entertainment sites like Torrents so that their students and employees can use the Internet only for work purposes. In all such instances, proxies prove to be extremely helpful. They hide your IP address or mask it with a proxy IP address to let you bypass such restrictions.
Besides this, proxies also provide you with enhanced security, faster speed, anonymity, and help you with remote working, making online purchases, data mining, brand monitoring, web scraping, and more.
To understand how to travel aggregators use proxies for web scraping, let’s first see how proxies perform web scraping and which proxies are the best for web scraping.
How Proxies Help in Web Scraping?
Web scraping is a process of gathering data or extracting data from different websites in large amounts. However, there are high chances of facing IP blocking if you perform web scraping without the help of proxies. Why?
For instance, suppose you have to extract 100 pages of data from a website. After you extract, say about 50 pages, the website will be able to detect something unusual in your behavior as most websites have high security. As a result, they block your real IP address to prevent you from further data extraction.
However, a proxy server masks your real IP address to get blocked or detected by websites. Residential proxies are the best for web scraping tasks as they use IPs of real residential users. Therefore, it becomes incredibly challenging for websites to flag them as proxies. Hence, you must buy residential proxies in case you want to perform web scraping.
Why Proxies are a Must for Travel Fare Aggregation?
All travel fare aggregators use proxies for travel fare aggregation. They require proxies for web scraping. Proxies are used to extract valuable data such as flight fares, hotel listings, sigh-seeing, etc. from various websites or sources. Without automatic web scraping, travel fare aggregation cannot be achieved. This is because there will be issues of geo-restrictions, IP blocking, and also speed. Proxies help extract large amounts of data from different sources in minutes without the tension of IP blocking or other restrictions.
Moreover, the possibility of getting blocked is almost negligible if you use residential proxies. These proxies used IPs that belong to authentic residential users. Hence, they are difficult to flag as proxies. Thus, proxies assist travel aggregators in extracting valuable information.
Conclusion
Travel fare aggregation is unimaginable without proxies. Without proxies, how travel fare aggregators will extract data or perform web scraping? It isn’t possible due to the issues of security, IP blocking, and geo-restrictions. Also, proxies increase the speed at which web scraping is done significantly. In this way, travel fare aggregators can extract all the valuable information, including flight fares, hotel pricing, and more, within minutes.