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Daily competitor price monitoring for a small accommodation business
Daily competitor price monitoring for a small accommodation business: a script appends a dated price column to the same workbook, backing it up first.
The challenge
Checking competitors’ prices by hand every day.
A small accommodation business wanted to see what nearby competitors charge for a night without walking the booking portal by hand every day.
Our approach
A script, a runner and instructions for a daily run.
We wrote a script in Python that reads a sheet of watched properties, finds the price per night for a given stay through a headless browser and appends a dated price column to the same workbook. Before every write it takes a timestamped backup of the file.
✓ Configuration controls how many days ahead to ask, the number of nights and the delay between queries
✓ A deliberate delay between queries, so the portal does not block the script
✓ A runner, two verification tests and instructions for running it daily from cron
Evidenced outcome
The log records one completed run; this was a single day of work, not a maintained codebase.