A Web Crawler Framework for Revenue Management

Smart Revenue Management (SRM) is a project which aims the development of smart automatic techniques for an efficient optimization of occupancy and rates of hotel accommodations, commonly referred to, as Revenue Management. To get the best revenues, the hotel managers must have access to actual and reliable information about the competitive set of the hotels they manage, in order to anticipate and influence consumer’s behavior and maximize revenue. One way to get some of the necessary information is to inspect the most popular booking and travel websites where hotels promote themselves and consumers make reservations and provide reviews about their experiences. This paper presents a web crawler framework to perform automatic extraction of information from those sites, to facilitate the (RM) process of a particular hotel. The crawler periodically accesses the targeted websites and extracts information about a set of features that characterize the hotels listed there. Additionally, we present the document-oriented database used to store the retrieved information and discuss the usefulness of this framework in the context of the SRM system.