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BuildNot yet confirmed elsewhere1 publisher2 min readPublished

Hotel prices in code now come from scraping or a supplier contract

Amadeus shut its free Self-Service API, Hotel Search included, on 17 July, so small developers lack a free official hotel price feed. A dev.to post by a scraper vendor says what remains is reading Google Hotels' public page; selling rooms still takes a supplier contract.

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Illustration accompanying Hotel prices in code now come from scraping or a supplier contract
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The scraping route costs under a cent per hotel Pricing of the Apify Google Hotels scraper, stated by its builder (the post's author); per-record cost and free-credit coverage are derived from it.

Key figures: a hotel record with its booking-site price list costs $0.0075. The base fee is $1.50 per 1,000 hotels. Apify's free plan gives $5 of credit a month, which covers about 666 hotel records with booking-site lists.

The scraping route costs under a cent per hotel
FigureValueNoteClaim
Hotel record with site price list0.0075 $ per hotel19
Base scraper fee1.5 $/1,000 hotelsVendor's own pricing14
Apify free plan credit5 $ a month16
Records the free credit covers666 hotel recordsAbout; includes booking-site lists20

What happened

  • Google's Travel Partner API is for hotels and booking sites that send prices to Google, and it authenticates with OAuth2 against the caller's own Hotel Center account.
  • The old Amadeus Hotel Search docs URL now redirects to the company homepage, and the official amadeus-python repository was archived at 10:04 UTC on 17 July 2026.
  • Booking.com's Demand API requires registration as a Managed Affiliate Partner, and Partner Centre access arrives only after an account manager and a signed contract.
  • One developer documented in September 2026 that a CJ application is separate from Demand API access, and their Partner Centre login said they had "no access rights".

Why it matters

  • decision Teams with Amadeus Self-Service code must now choose between an Enterprise contract, which the post says continues, and rewriting against the public results page.
  • exposure A tracker built on the public page inherits its gaps. SerpApi's roadmap carries open reports of missing prices and missing regional results.
  • constraint Scraped prices cannot back a booking flow. The post says selling rooms needs a supplier contract such as Expedia Rapid, Booking.com or a bedbank.

Google has no public API for the prices on Google Hotels [1]. According to the post, no endpoint returns what Booking.com or Expedia charge for a hotel the caller does not manage [3].

The other routes sit behind contracts. Expedia's Rapid getting-started page says: "To integrate with Rapid API, you need to be an Expedia partner." [10] Even then the key stays in development mode until a business development manager arranges a site review [11]. The post calls that process sensible for a booking business and a wall for a side project, a price tracker or a research script [12].

Booking.com adds a further complication. The post, citing Skift from May 2025, says Booking.com closed its own affiliate programme in 2025 and shifted its affiliates onto networks like CJ and Awin [8].

That leaves the public page. Google Hotels shows each hotel's nightly and total price for the searched dates, plus the booking sites and what each charges [23]. The post's author built the Apify scraper it recommends, and says so [13].

At the listed rates, a hotel record with its booking-site list costs $0.0075. That is $1.50 per 1,000 hotels, or $0.0015 each, plus $0.006 [19]. Apify's free plan includes $5 of credit a month [16], which covers about 666 such records [20]. A tracker that checks 30 hotels a day, our example, would use it up in about 22 days [21]. Hotels removed by your filters and failed searches are not charged [15].

The sample run shows the shape of the output and little about coverage. It was one query for Lisbon, capped at three hotels, on 12 October 2026 [24]. Brown's Avenue Hotel came back at $180 a night on Google across 20 sites, with Vio.com listing $185 [24]. For that to transfer to your workload, the page would have to return complete prices for your cities, dates and currency. The post says SerpApi's public roadmap has open issues titled "Some prices are missing in the search results" (14 comments) and "Some regional results don't show up" (16 comments) [17].

We think the post's map of closed doors is accurate for read-only price data, and you can check it against the Amadeus homepage and Booking.com's prerequisites list. The scraper recommendation is the author's own product. The post does not say whether reading the page at volume is permitted.

What to watch

  • Whether Amadeus offers any small-developer tier under its Enterprise portal now that Self-Service is gone.
  • Whether SerpApi closes its open reports on missing prices and missing regional results.
  • Whether Booking.com's CJ and Awin affiliate networks gain a route to Demand API access.

Clarity's read

What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Insufficient
Hype gap+10
Incentives70
Confidence55
Why these scores

Claim ledger

Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.

  1. [1]

    Google has no public API for the prices shown on Google Hotels.

    ReportedSupportedView cited source
  2. [2]

    Google's Travel Partner API is for hotels and booking sites that send prices to Google; it authenticates with OAuth2 against the caller's own Hotel Center account and reads their own price views and reports.

    ReportedSupportedView cited source
  3. [3]

    There is no endpoint that returns what Booking.com or Expedia charge for a hotel the caller does not manage.

    ReportedSupportedSource: dev.to postView cited source

Sources

1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.

  1. dev.to

    1 article · October 12, 2026

    There's no Google Hotels API, and the free fallbacks closed

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