1. Big Data: Automatic hotel prices collection on the Internet for the Tourism Survey in the Basque Country
EUSTAT. Euskal Estatistika Erakundea – Basque Statistics Office
Elena Goni
Jorge Aramendi
Anjeles Iztueta
Javier San Vicente
New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics (NTTS)
Brussels, March 2017 1 1

2. Tourism Occupancy Survey (ETR)
ADR: Average Daily Rate for an occupied double room 2 2

3. Background Tourism Occupancy Survey (ETR) Monthly survey
Temporary sampling scheme on all the units in our Tourism Register
Strata: geographical areas and hotel category
Estimates: travelers and night stays, accommodation offered, occupancy rate, average stay, employees.
Target in 2017, information about prices:
The Average Daily Rate (ADR) is the price for an occupied double room, just for the accommodation, and no other services and / or taxes, and
the Revenue per Available Room (REVPAR) 3 3 3

4. Prices in the survey vs. prices on the Web4 4

5. Web scraping Collaboration with the Information Technology Faculty,
Basque Country University (EHU-UPV).
import.io
Booking, 1,000 hotels and establishments
Standard double room, no breakfast, no taxes
Target: prices for only hotels and pensions, 556 establishments
Prices for 7 and 14 days in advance
Data-collection period: 45 days, 27 of January to 11 of March 2016,
records 5 5 5

6. Problems capturing the data
Lack of information for some hotels / dates
Connection errors
Problems for making several queries in a short time
Booking modifies the structure of the Website
Outliers, errors and duplicates
Hotel names are not permanent, they may change 6 6 6

7. Frame coverage
Table 1. Coverage ratio of Booking to the Tourism Register by hotel category and geographical area, in hotel bed-places 7 7

8. Output of the scraping
Figure 1. Coverage ratio of Booking over the Tourism Register by date, in establishments and hotel bed-places 8 8

9. Output of the scraping Average price in Euros TOTAL 73 73 € H5 177 165
Table 2. Average price by hotel category by number of days in advance
Average price in Euros
7 days
14 days
TOTAL 73
73 € H5
177
165 H4
102 H3 77 H2 76 H1 66 P2 61 62 P1 49 9 9

10. Comparing Booking – Tourism Survey
Figure 2. Average ADR, Online Tour Operator and Booking prices by categories, Feb-Mar 2016 10 10

11. Comparing Booking – Tourism Survey
Figure 3. Booking average price and average ADR by categories and month 11 11

12. Conclusions - balance Cost? ¿ Easy? Integration? Quality?
Continuous monitoring
Initial programing is intensive
Affordable technology
Cost is acceptable
Reduction of the survey burden
Scraping with difficulties
Data editing necessary
Data linkage
Work calendars very strict and tight
Hard efforts for integration in the production process
Concepts harmonization necessary
High coverage
Scraping biases 12 12

13. More questions More data sources
Obtain prices for everyday, several prices a day (Summer, Easter,…)
4 or 3 months ahead 13 13

14. www.eustat.eus Eskerrik asko Elena Goni (elena_goni@eustat.eus)
Jorge Aramendi
Anjeles Iztueta
Javier San Vicente 14 14