Project Details

Travelocity Researcher is a web scraper that gathers comparative vehicle rental rates from the Travelocity website and displays them in an easy-to-read visual grid or saves them to one of several convenient formats.

Status: Complete (News)

Download: Python Scripts - Windows Executable

Installation and Operation:
Travelocity Researcher takes a US airport code and provides a list of all available rental vehicles at the airport, by vehicle type and price. For more information, view the built-in help topics available from the program's Help menu.

Installation Instructions
To install Travelocity Researcher:

  • Download the zipped package here.
  • Open the zipped file (in Windows, you can right-click and choose "Open" or "Open With | Compressed Folders")
  • Copy or drag the folder named "Travelocity Researcher" out of the zipped file to a location on your computer (Desktop or My Documents folder often works best). If you don't see a folder in the zipped file, choose "Extract" and make sure the "Preserve Folder Structure" option is checked.
  • Open the folder and run "Travelocity Researcher.exe"
  • Go to the File menu and choose "Preferences"
  • In the very first field, change Airport Code from "okc" to your local 3-letter airport code ("tul" for Tulsa). Then click OK.
  • Go to the File menu and choose "Today's Results" (or just press F5)
After a few seconds, the charts should appear. Travelocity Researcher will save your changes to Preferences, so in the future you can just open the program and press F5 to get updated information.

The real power of Travelocity Researcher is in its harvesting and reporting functionality. Once you have the charts, you can go to the File menu and choose "Save As" to output the data to a TXT document or an Excel Spreadsheet (if Excel is installed on your computer). You can also use run the program "Travelocity (Automatic).exe" to gather the data from Travelocity and output it directly to your preferred output format without ever opening the program interface.

Source Code
The archive files available above also include the Python source scripts so you see exactly how the program works. If you have Python installed and configured on your machine, you can simply run "Travelocity Researcher.py" to view the GUI, or "Travelocity (Automatic).py" to generate a Rate Comparison Report according to the settings in "User Settings.xml."

Known Issues:
  • The GUI display is built to a fixed grid size based on the most common distribution of rental companies and vehicle types. Some markets will vary, resulting in a distorted grid or missing entries. Note that all available data is included in the saved Rate Comparison Report, even if it does not appear on the GUI's grid.
Future Development:
  • Expand spreadsheet support to work with OpenOffice.org, in addition to Microsoft Excel.
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