WHAT MADE ME DECIDE TO WEBSCRAPE AWARD FLIGHTS
As frequent travelers, my wife and I are always looking for ways to save money on flights. One strategy we’ve stumbled upon is to take advantage of credit card points and fly using award flights. However, we quickly realized,like so many others, that finding award flight availability can be a daunting task. That’s when I had the idea to build a web scraper using Selenium to help streamline the process.
I decided to focus on scraping data for flights to Spain, where we travel to every year and where my wife’s family lives. I knew that there were numerous airlines offering award flights to Spain, but finding availability was challenging. With my scraper, I could easily access flight data for the dates I planned to fly.
GETTING STARTED
To get started, I did what I always do, turned to Google. I found a few helpful resources on web scraping with Selenium. The first was a Kayak web scraping guide, which provided a useful introduction to the subject. I also looked to the JohnWR channel on YouTube for more specific guidance on scraping flight data.
Once I had a good understanding of the process, I began building my scraper. I used Selenium, a powerful tool for automating web browsers, to navigate to klm’s websites and collect flight data.
The script was straightforward and collected all of the relevant data and compiled it into a spreadsheet, which I could easily sort and analyze.
Using my scraper, I was able to quickly gather a wealth of data on award flight availability to Spain. This made it much easier for me to plan my travel and find the best deals on flights.
EXPERIENCE
Overall, building a web scraper with Selenium was a rewarding experience. Not only did it save me time and money on travel, but it also gave me a better understanding of the power of web scraping. If you’re interested in building your own scraper, I highly recommend checking out the resources I used and giving it a try for yourself. Who knows, you might just uncover some hidden travel deals along the way!