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Comment by richardknop | Hacker News Reader

Well the obvious scraping business ideas would be hotel rooms and airplane tickets. You might think this area is already saturated but I think there’s still room for disruption and you can capture niche giants like Expedia / Skyscanner / Agoda / Booking don’t handle well. Or you could do b2b with these companies.

Also, what about scraping restaurant menus and offering a food search engine?

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There's probably a reason those sites don't handle niches very well: There's no scalable business model for those.

Travel / accommodation is a highly competitive as well as intentionally convoluted market. The participants don't want their customers to easily find the best offer. Sites like Expedia or Booking aren't complex and difficult to use because those companies don't know about UX. It's precisely the opposite. Problem is, the goals of their UX most of the time don't align with the users'.

Can you share any examples/ideas for niches that those sites don't already handle well?

I just booked a vacation on Expedia. What I really wanted was to find a list of rooms by price (airfare included) which can comfortably sleep 4 people - so I needed 4 actual beds. I tried looking at bigger rooms, but it looked like booking 2 cheap rooms was less expensive, but I'm still not sure if that's true. So basically you could see if you can accommodate large parties. Also, when I booked the rooms, I think it made me select one type, but in theory, i might have wanted one ocean front room and one without the view.

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