Puneet Auluck
12/13/2015
IS 607 Final Project
My objective for this project is to find best deals on NY hotels in January 2016 on popular travel sites. For now, I have decided to use the first month of the year but it can be easily tweaked to view other months.
Intially, I had decided to web scrape Priceline and Expedia to compare prices. However, because the web pages were not static, I was not able to pull source code using RCurl. Then, I found trivago.com travel site that compares prices from known sites such as Priceline, Expedia, Hotwire and etc. Its source code does not hide the data that I need to investigate.
Raw data
Cleaned data
Best deals
Hotel Vs Price grouped by Checked In Date
Which hotel has the best deals in January?
Which travel site delivers the best deals?
Plot of all best deals
As of today, according to my analysis, the average price for a popular hotel in New York is $134. The best time to stay is during mid January when the prices do not fluctuate. Element New York Times Square West seems to be better bargain for hotel. The travel sites Hotwire and Priceline offer the best pricing.