Web Scraping for Revenue Managers

Ferrater Mora was a well know Catalan Philosopher one of his famous ideas can be summarized in this way “extremes are not for situating yourself they are for knowing your situation” I love to use this idea when I introduce frameworks to my Touristologists.

For instance, Top-Down versus Bottom-up approach you can put them at the extremes and see your situation in a lot of topics.

We can apply this in Touristology as we saw in this post or in Web-Engineering as we discussed here.

Yes Jordi, BUT… How on earth is this useful for a revenue manager?

You must be kidding me!  Just remember Abraham Maslow saying "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

So, Web Scraping is an useful tool and I can provide thousands of examples!

For instance… Wait a moment! I think it will better the other way around!!!

YOU provide YOUR examples and I will grade them and then I will provide mine!

OK, OK, I will provide a few clues, deal?

My example 1….

Go to your competitor’s web site. Remember you only have competitors if they appear in the mind of your customer. The new segment, new strategic triangle idea, remember?

Go to Data Aggregators, On-line Travel Agencies… and get their prices.

Learn if they are doing any kind of opacity or customization with the prices…

With all this information… get knowledge…. make a wiser decision!!!

I LOVE TOURISTOLOGY!!!!

My example 2…

Wait a moment, can you use the same approach in order to value my/your/their on-line reputation? In order to know what my customers (or potential customers) are saying about my hotel and the competitors.

Which website will you choose (epinions? tripadvisor?... You name it!)

There is an evolving and very interesting methodology to classify opinions both objective and subjective. It is called sentiment analysis.

You can see and example here.

You also can enjoy Semantic Web for tourism enterprises made easy in this video as I tweeted...

With all this information… get knowledge…. Make a wiser decision!!!

I LOVE TOURISTOLOGY!!!!

Clear enough? I hope so! Because you’re the future of Touristology!!!