Vrbo Scraper — Vacation Rental Data Extraction

Full-featured vacation rental scraper for Vrbo: listing discovery, detail page extraction, pricing, amenities, host info, and geolocation. Handles anti-bot detection with undetected-chromedriver.

Overview

Scrapes vacation rental listings from Vrbo with two-phase extraction:

1. Discovery phase — Searches by city/region, paginates through results, collects listing URLs
2. Detail phase — Visits each listing to extract full property data including pricing, amenities, rooms, host info, policies, images, and coordinates

Built with undetected-chromedriver to handle Vrbo's anti-bot protections, including captcha detection with manual resolution prompts.

Features

• City-based search — Configure cities with check-in/check-out dates, guests, currency
• Auto-pagination — Scrolls and clicks through all result pages
• Deep detail extraction — 30+ data fields per listing
• Anti-bot handling — undetected-chromedriver with custom Chrome profiles
• Captcha detection — Pauses and prompts when blocked
• Cookie injection — Manual cookie support for pre-authenticated sessions
• Geolocation — Extracts latitude/longitude from property pages
• JSON output — Structured results saved per run
• Configurable — Environment variables for all settings

Data Points Extracted

Category	Fields
Property	ID, name, type, description, status
Pricing	Amount, currency, text, plan name
Location	Address, city, country, latitude, longitude
Rooms	Room details, bed configuration, sleeps count
Amenities	Popular amenities, full amenity list
Host	Name, avatar, languages, contact URL
Policies	Check-in/out rules, cancellation, house rules
Images	Up to 12 property images
Search context	Check-in/out dates, adults, children, region

Tech Stack

• undetected-chromedriver — Bypasses Selenium/automation detection
• Selenium WebDriver — Browser automation and DOM interaction
• Python 3.10+ — Dataclasses, type hints, pathlib

Installation

git clone https://github.com/Edioff/vrbo-scraper.git
cd vrbo-scraper
pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

Cities file (cities.vrbo.json)

{
  "cities": [
    {
      "name": "Bogota",
      "region_name": "Bogota, Colombia",
      "region_id": "-592318",
      "nights": 2,
      "adults": 2
    }
  ]
}

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Description
VRBO_MAX_PAGES	1	Max search result pages to scrape
VRBO_HEADLESS	true	Run Chrome in headless mode
VRBO_NAVIGATION_DELAY	2.5	Delay between page navigations (seconds)
VRBO_SCROLL_PAUSE	0.4	Pause between scroll actions
VRBO_FORCE_TOMORROW	true	Auto-set check-in to tomorrow
VRBO_MAX_DETAIL_TARGETS	0	Limit detail pages (0 = unlimited)
VRBO_COOKIE_STRING	—	Manual cookie injection
VRBO_FRESH_PROFILE	false	Use fresh Chrome profile each run

Usage

python vrbo_scraper.py

Results are saved to data/vrbo_results_<timestamp>.json.

How It Works

1. Load city configurations from cities.vrbo.json
2. Launch Chrome with undetected-chromedriver
3. For each city:
   a. Build search URL with dates/guests/region
   b. Load search page, scroll to load all cards
   c. Extract listing URLs from property cards
   d. Paginate (click "Next") up to VRBO_MAX_PAGES
4. For each discovered listing:
   a. Navigate to detail page
   b. Wait for heading to load
   c. Scroll to trigger lazy-loaded content
   d. Extract __PLUGIN_STATE__ JSON (embedded data)
   e. Parse DOM for amenities, rooms, policies, host
   f. Extract coordinates from meta tags
   g. Save structured data
5. Output all results as JSON

Notes

• Designed for educational and research purposes
• Respect Vrbo's Terms of Service and robots.txt
• Use responsible rate limiting and delays
• Captcha may appear; the scraper pauses for manual resolution

Author

Johan Cruz — Data Engineer & Web Scraping Specialist

• GitHub: @Edioff
• Available for freelance projects

License

MIT