How To Use Pixiebrix for Scraping Airbnb Data Into Google Sheets With Pixiebrix
With PixieBrix you can pull Airbnb listing data you need into a digestible Google Sheet, making it simple to find the right rental for you.
Each year, millions of people around the world use Airbnb to find accommodations when traveling. Among those millions, a good chunk of them have probably struggled to decide on the perfect place to book.
Not only are there tons of homes to choose from — more than 5 million globally, in fact — but the app doesn’t make it all that easy to compare listings. And this becomes exponentially more difficult if you’re trying to decide with a group of people. You end up sending links back and forth, trying to call out specific photos or features, while doing fast math on pricing with cleaning fees… suddenly the group chat is just out of control
Thankfully, there’s a much easier way to compare Airbnb listings. With PixieBrix you can pull all the listing data you need into a digestible Google Sheet, making it simple to find the right rental for you. That’s a process called “data scraping.” Here’s how to do it.
Build an Airbnb data scraping tool with PixieBrix
Step 1: Set up your Google Sheet for Airbnb scraping
First, you’re going to need to create a Google Sheet to house the listing data you’re scraping from Airbnb.
If you’re really new to Sheets, anyone with a Gmail account has access to Google’s spreadsheet tool. All you need to do is visit your Gmail inbox, click on the icon with nine tiny squares on the top right of your screen, and click “Drive.” Once there, click “New,” select “Google Sheets,” and then “Blank spreadsheet.” Then you’re off to the races.
Name your Sheet and add column headers to match the data you want to pull for each listing.
In my case, I was booking a place on the beach to celebrate my birthday with my partner and sisters. To compare places, I wanted to scrape:
- The name of the location
- A link to the Airbnb listing
- The total price
- The total number of beds
Here’s what my simple sheet looks like:
Step 2: Use PixieBrix’s intuitive page editor to build your Airbnb scraping tool
PixieBrix is a low-code browser automation platform that allows you to customize webpages, automate the scraping of platforms like Airbnb, and so much more.
Once you sign-up, download the PixieBrix Chrome extension. Then head over to Airbnb.
Bring up a link to a listing you want to scrape. Then right-click on the page and select “inspect.” At the top of the inspection screen, there will be a series of options like “elements” and “console.” Scroll through these options until you see PixieBrix and click it.
Step 3: Add a button
There are a few options for how you trigger the Airbnb scraping, but the easiest is to just add a button. To do so, click the “Add” button on the top right of the PixieBrix menu and select “Button.”
Then name your button. You can name it anything, from “New button” to “Airbnb scraping.”
Just click the big “Add” button in the top left. Select a part of the listing page with other buttons to add it. Then from the PixieBrix menu you can name it in the “caption” field and choose the icon in the “location” field. In this case, we:
- chose the “Share” button
- named the button “Send to Sheet”
- gave it a “send” icon
- and placed it at the “Start” of the row
Here’s what it looks like on the page.
Step 4: Add the Extract from Page brick
Now we need to parse some info from the page to be able to send to our sheet. This is really easy to do with PixieBrix’s Extract from Page brick (also formerly known as the Jquery selector reader).
Click the “plus” symbol to add another brick and pick the Jquery selector reader. Then click the cursor arrow under “value” and pick whatever data on the page you want to scrape. Repeat that process for multiple values by clicking “add property.”
For instance, if you wanted to grab the name of the property, the total cost (not nightly cost), and beds, here’s what it would look like.
With that done, you just need one more brick to add for your Airbnb scraping tool. This one will map that data to a row in Google Sheets.
Step 5: Build your “Add Google Sheets row” brick
Hit the “plus” symbol again to add one final brick. Choose the “Add Google Sheets row” brick, connect your spreadsheet of choice, and then tell PixieBrix what data to map to which columns.
Here’s how I did it. Just reference the data brick and each property into the column name that it goes into. Notice I called my Jquery brick output “data”, which is how I referenced @data.variable. To get the URL, you don’t need to reference the data brick—instead you can reference the page context from when you clicked the button. To do that, just type `@input.url`.
A custom Airbnb scraping tool in just a few steps!
When you click the button on an Airbnb listing, it will grab the text from the name, the price, and number of beds, as well as the URL of the listing and send that to your Google Sheet. From there, you can sort and manipulate the data however you want to make sure you’re renting the best possible place for you. Then, all you need to do is share your Google Sheet with your travel companions and find the best option. Who knew scraping data from Airbnb could be this simple?
Whether it’s Airbnb, Google Sheets, or any other website, PixieBrix can help save you time and effort.
What else can you do with PixieBrix?
On the PixieBrix marketplace, you’ll find tons of pre-built mods for some of the websites and apps you use every day, like Airbnb, Google Sheets, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more. Here are just a few things you can do with PixieBrix mods:
