How to Access Hotel Pricing Data Without Being an Official OTA Partner

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already tried and failed to get hotel pricing data from Expedia or Booking.com. You filled out forms, waited for replies, and maybe even sent a follow-up email or two. Still nothing. 

Don’t worry. Whether you’re building a travel app, a price comparison tool, a hotel dashboard, or something totally new, this guide will show you simple ways to get hotel price data without joining any special partner programs or ticking off a long list of requirements.

Why Getting Direct Access Is So Hard

1. Partner-Only Access

Expedia’s Rapid API and Booking.com’s pricing APIs aren’t open public APIs. To use them, you have to become an official partner first. Reaching out to them and getting a response is a challenge in itself. Even if you’re lucky enough to get a reply, you’ll need to go through an approval process, then meet their launch requirements, and in some cases, prove that you already manage or sell a high volume of bookings. If you’re a small player, it’s a dead end before you even start.

2. Strict Usage Rules

Booking.com bans caching prices or availability, blocks using their data for comparison sites, and limits how you can display prices. Expedia has similar restrictions, especially if you’re pulling data for meta-search or analytics.

3. Heavy Compliance Load

Handling certain payment flows triggers PCI compliance. Virtual cards, foreign exchange buffers, and other back-office requirements can be overwhelming if you don’t already have a big operations team.

Well, you’re not alone in this. Many developers have expressed their disappointment in forums about trying to get this data and hitting the same walls. It’s not that you’re doing something wrong. The system is just built to keep hotel pricing APIs in the hands of large, approved partners.

Common (Failed) Workarounds People Try

Getting API access from Booking.com and Expedia is highly sought after, but also notoriously difficult. Because of that, many developers and companies look for other ways to get the same data. If you haven’t tried these yet, here’s a heads-up:

1. Using Unofficial Keys

If you spend enough time on forums or in certain developer groups, you’ll find people claiming they have “official” Expedia or Booking.com API keys and offering to share them with you, sometimes for a fee. The truth is, if they aren’t an approved partner, those keys are either stolen, expired, or tied to someone else’s account. Using them can get you blocked quickly.

So how do you tell if a provider is real? A legitimate hotel API provider will have:

• Their own company website with contact details
• A clear partnership or reseller agreement with data sources
• Transparent documentation and onboarding process
• Pricing that makes sense for the scope of the data
• Presence in multiple online directories, industry listings, or guest posts (you can search their brand name to check)
  

If all you get is a random Google Drive link, an email with an API key pasted in, or a Telegram username, it’s almost certainly fake. While there are genuine hotel API providers out there, you won’t find them handing out keys in a public forum thread.

2. Web Scraping

Since pricing is visible on public listings, some people try scraping it directly from the websites. But this quickly runs into problems: CAPTCHAs, IP blocks, constant HTML structure changes, and the risk of violating the site’s terms of service. Even if you get it working, keeping it stable over time is a lot harder than it sounds.

Get Hotel Price Data Using Makcorps API

Makcorps has been a reliable hotel price API provider for over a decade. It helps developers and businesses get real-time hotel price comparisons from over 200 OTAs and hotel chains with easy documentation and API access process. 

Types of Makcorps Hotel Price APIs:

• Search by City ID
  Gives you a full list of hotels in a city, along with the four cheapest vendors per listing. You provide parameters like city ID, dates, currency, room count, and number of adults/children. To know more, check out the documentation.
  
• Search by Hotel ID
  Focused on a single hotel, this returns pricing from over 15 vendors using the hotel ID, room count, date range, and currency. To know more, check out the documentation.
  

Expedia & Booking.com Alternatives via Makcorps

You can also pull prices directly from major OTAs without going through their official programs:

• Booking.com Hotel Price API
  Returns live pricing based on country code, hotel ID, dates, number of guests/rooms, currency, and kids. Each request consumes 1 credit. Check out the documentation.

• Expedia Hotel Price API
  This also works similarly and requires the Expedia hotel ID, dates, guest count, rooms, currency, and uses 2 credits per request. Check out the documentation.
  

Learn More Through Step-by-Step Tutorials

To understand these APIs in action, you can explore practical tutorials. Even if you don’t have coding experience, and still need hotel price data. We have got you covered. It’s also perfect for revenue managers or anyone who just needs the numbers without the dev work.

• Extract hotel prices from multiple vendors into Google Sheets
  
• Fetch Booking.com prices directly into Google Sheets
  
• Use Python scripts with Makcorps API for custom data pulls
  
• Track hotel deals under budget with automated API queries
  

These guides walk you through real examples, so you can see exactly how the data flows and how to apply it to your project.

Conclusion:

Getting hotel price data from Expedia or Booking.com is nearly impossible without being a big partner. Makcorps makes it simple, giving you reliable, real-time prices from 200+ OTAs, including alternatives for both platforms, with no long approval process.

Skip the roadblocks and start pulling accurate hotel data in minutes. Try Makcorps API for free today with 30 API calls.