Accommodation data · hotels + short-term rentals · REST + MCP
One accommodation API for both halves of the market.
Every other option covers half the map — hotels-only (LiteAPI, Hotelbeds) or short-term-rental-only (AirDNA, AirROI). ScoutingAPI returns live search, availability, and price for hotels and short-term rentals alike — Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and Google Hotels — in one unified schema.
Hotels + short-term rentals in one call · 100 credits free, no card · failed or empty calls cost 0 credits
GET /v1/search
?location=Sibenik, HR
&checkIn=2026-07-13&checkOut=2026-07-20
&adults=2&children=2
&platforms=airbnb,vrbo,booking{
"data": [
{
"id": "stays_airbnb_42307961", "platform": "airbnb",
"name": "Seafront villa near Sibenik with pool",
"propertyType": "villa",
"guestRating": 4.92, "ratingScale": 5, "reviewCount": 86,
"maxOccupancy": 8, "bedrooms": 4, "bathrooms": 3,
"amenities": ["pool", "kitchen", "wifi", "air_conditioning", "sea_view"],
"price": { "currency": "EUR", "nightlyPrice": 375, "totalPrice": 2625, "nights": 7 }
},
{
"id": "stays_vrbo_5663861ha", "platform": "vrbo",
"name": "Awesome home in Pirovac with swimming pool",
"propertyType": "house",
"guestRating": 4.8, "ratingScale": 5, "reviewCount": 142,
"maxOccupancy": 8, "bedrooms": 3, "bathrooms": 2,
"amenities": ["pool", "kitchen", "air_conditioning", "wifi", "bbq"],
"price": { "currency": "EUR", "nightlyPrice": 350, "totalPrice": 2450, "nights": 7 }
},
{
"id": "stays_booking_abramovic2", "platform": "booking",
"name": "Apartments Abramovic 2",
"propertyType": "apartment",
"starRating": 4, "guestRating": 9.4, "ratingScale": 10, "reviewCount": 318,
"maxOccupancy": 6, "bedrooms": 2, "bathrooms": 2,
"amenities": ["kitchen", "wifi", "air_conditioning", "balcony", "sea_view"],
"price": { "currency": "EUR", "nightlyPrice": 303, "totalPrice": 2122, "nights": 7 }
}
],
"meta": {
"platforms": ["airbnb", "vrbo", "booking"], "cached": false,
"creditsCharged": 15, "currency": "EUR",
"platformResults": [
{ "platform": "airbnb", "status": "ok", "count": 1 },
{ "platform": "vrbo", "status": "ok", "count": 1 },
{ "platform": "booking", "status": "ok", "count": 1 }
]
}
}Show, don’t sell
A short-term rental and a hotel — same object, same call.
This is an actual multi-platform /v1/search response. An Airbnb villa, a Vrbo house, and a Booking.com hotel come back in one array with an identical shape — only the values and native ratingScale differ. Write your code once; point it at every platform.
platformWhich source the row came from — airbnb, vrbo, booking, or google — in one merged array.
propertyTypeNormalized across the whole market: hotel | apartment | house | villa | cottage | other.
guestRating + ratingScaleThe rating and its native scale — 5 for STR, 10 for hotels — so cross-platform comparison is honest.
amenities[]One canonical taxonomy (pool, wifi, sea_view, …) whether it’s a hotel or a rental.
priceEmbedded nightly + total price with fees when you pass dates — identical shape per platform.
meta.creditsCharged5 credits per successful platform leg — and 0 for any leg that fails or is empty.
The fields don’t change between a short-term rental and a hotel: normalized propertyType, guestRating with its native ratingScale (Airbnb/Vrbo return 5, Booking returns 10 — always read ratingScale so you never mis-compare), the canonical amenity vocabulary, and an embedded price when you pass dates. Each failed platform leg would contribute 0 credits; here all three succeeded.
Self-serve access
Instant access. No partner application. No sales call.
The official accommodation APIs are gated (Booking.com and Expedia partner programs, Vrbo connectivity onboarding) and Airbnb has none at all — while enterprise STR data (AirDNA) is sales-gated. ScoutingAPI is self-serve: sign up, get a key, make your first call in under five minutes.
100 free credits — no credit card
Enough to build and test against real responses across hotels and short-term rentals before you decide anything.
scout_test_ sandbox at zero cost
Deterministic fixtures for every platform and endpoint wire up your integration before you spend a credit.
One integration for the whole market
Add or drop a platform without touching your code — the object shape is identical across all of them.
- 1Get your free key
- 2curl the /v1/search example
- 3Ship
The trust wedge
Reliability you can build a product on.
Scrapers and RapidAPI listings give you raw data and a shrug; gated partner programs give you a contract and a queue. We run a product — monitoring, multi-actor failover, retries, and caching behind one contract.
99.9% monthly uptime SLA
Committed on the ScoutingAPI response envelope and published on a public status page. Multi-actor failover, retries, and caching sit behind one contract.
Failed calls cost 0 credits
Failed, empty, or blocked calls are never charged. On a multi-platform call each failed leg contributes 0 and is surfaced as meta.partial — you pay only for what succeeded.
One schema, hotels and rentals
The unified Property object is identical for a hotel and a short-term rental. Write your integration once; it works across the whole market and every endpoint.
Runnable in five minutes
curl it, import the SDK, or hand it to your agent.
Every sample calls /v1/search across hotels and short-term rentals in one request, copy-paste runnable against your free key and generated from @scoutingapi/sdk so it never drifts from the live API.
curl -s -G "https://api.scoutingapi.com/v1/search" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer scout_test_YOUR_KEY" \
--data-urlencode "location=Sibenik, HR" \
--data-urlencode "checkIn=2026-07-13" \
--data-urlencode "checkOut=2026-07-20" \
--data-urlencode "adults=2" \
--data-urlencode "children=2" \
--data-urlencode "platforms=airbnb,vrbo,booking,google"
# One call, every platform — hotels and short-term rentals in one schema. scout_test_ is $0.The MCP tab adds ScoutingAPI’s native server (Streamable HTTP, OAuth 2.1 / PKCE) to Claude, Cursor, or n8n — then the agent calls search_stays({ location: "Sibenik, HR", checkIn: "2026-07-13", checkOut: "2026-07-20", platforms: ["airbnb","vrbo","booking","google"] }) and reads the merged results straight from the tool.
The honest comparison
Accommodation data: scraper, gated partner API, analytics tool, or ScoutingAPI?
| Capability | ScoutingAPI | Raw scraper / RapidAPI | Hotel API (LiteAPI / Hotelbeds) | STR analytics (AirROI / AirDNA) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Access | Self-serve, free key in minutes | Self-serve, but per-actor | Self-serve, but hotels only | $10 min (AirROI) / ~$50k, sales-gated (AirDNA) |
| Market coverage | Hotels AND short-term rentals | One platform per actor | Hotels only (no Airbnb / Vrbo) | Short-term rentals only (no hotels) |
| Output schema | One unified schema, every platform | Different shape per actor | Hotel-specific | Analytics-specific |
| Live availability & price | Yes — search, availability, price for real dates | Yes (raw) | Yes (hotels only) | No — historical analytics (occupancy, ADR, RevPAR) |
| Cross-OTA price-compare | Yes — one property, every OTA, computed min/median | No | Own inventory only | No |
| Reliability | 99.9% SLA, status page, failover | None (~86% success, no SLA) | Vendor-dependent | Vendor-dependent |
| Failed-call billing | Free — 0 credits | You pay per attempt | n/a | n/a |
| Agent-native (MCP) | First-class MCP + OAuth + Connectors | Bolt-on per actor | Some (hotels only) | No |
| Pricing | Predictable credits + free tier | Pay-per-result | Contracts / revenue share | PAYG / enterprise contract |
The honest read: scrapers are powerful but you assemble and babysit the pipeline; hotel APIs cover only hotels; STR-analytics tools answer “how did this market perform,” not “what’s bookable now.” Only ScoutingAPI covers hotels and short-term rentals in one schema, with live availability, cross-OTA price-compare, and an SLA.
Built for real work
What developers and agents build on unified accommodation data.
Not “extract listings” — the cross-vertical outcomes a specific reader recognizes, with hotels and short-term rentals in one feed.
Cross-vertical travel search
Let users search hotels and short-term rentals side-by-side for the same destination and dates — one call, one schema, ranked together.
Cross-OTA rate shopping
Show the cheapest rate for a property across every OTA with /v1/price-compare — hotels and rentals alike — with computed min/median.
Market & investment intelligence
Pull live rates and availability across both verticals to underwrite a market or benchmark a portfolio against the full competitive set.
Hotelier & host competitive pricing
Benchmark a property against comparable hotels and rentals for the same dates and feed a pricing engine that doesn’t guess.
Availability & price-drop monitoring
Poll /v1/availability or /v1/price-compare and fire a Slack, email, or Telegram alert on a change — shippable from /workflows in minutes.
Accommodation agents
Give your AI agent one dependable tool for the whole market: “villa or hotel near Split, July 13–20, 2 adults + 2 kids” → normalized results via the native MCP server.
Answers
Accommodation API — frequently asked questions
The questions developers actually search — answered in full, with FAQ structured data for rich results.
One API for the whole accommodation market.
100 credits, no credit card. Search hotels and short-term rentals in one call, in under five minutes.
Hotels + short-term rentals in one schema · failed calls cost 0 credits · native MCP included