major travel sources unlocked
A travel and hospitality data company, selling pricing and availability intelligence to booking platforms and market analysts, had three high-value sources on their target list. Their previous vendor had written them off as too defended and too expensive to scrape at production scale. The company accepted them as permanent gaps. We delivered all three, by making a scrape that wasn't economically viable, viable.
These sources were not unscrapeable. They were uneconomical. By a standard approach, collecting one of them would take upwards of 100 million API calls per run, against aggressive anti-bot defences that push most teams onto expensive third-party bypass services. The all-in cost ran past $10,000 per run. At that price the data wasn't worth collecting, so the previous vendor didn't.
We made it viable on two fronts. First, we re-engineered how the data was requested. Higher-level logical optimization of the source's own API mechanism let us collect the same data with a small fraction of the API calls, with no measurable loss in coverage. Second, we used our own internal bypass technology rather than paying a third-party service, cutting the per-call cost again.
Neither change on its own would have been enough. Together, they took the cost from the $10,000-plus the data company had been quoted elsewhere down to $1,500 per run. At that price the data finally paid for itself, and the client had a clear business case to buy. The scrape the previous vendor had written off became part of a standard production run.
The previous vendor saw a $10,000 problem and walked away. We saw an engineering problem and solved it. Capability proof beats capability promises.
The company was able to include these three sources in their data product for the first time. New pricing and availability intelligence they could package and sell, unlocked not by brute force but by making an unviable scrape viable.
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