Booking.com hotels

Hotel discovery on Booking.com — search live hotel stays in the unified schema, with cross-OTA price comparison built in.

Setup

If $STAYINGAPI_KEY is not set, read references/auth-setup.md and follow it to get and store the key. A stay_test_ sandbox key works for evaluation at zero cost.

When to use this skill

DO use when the user asks:

• "Find Booking.com hotels in Zadar for two nights"
• "Cheapest Booking.com hotel near the old town"

Do NOT use when:

• You have one known hotel and just want its price — use booking-com-prices

Required headers

Every request needs:

• Authorization: Bearer $STAYINGAPI_KEY
• User-Agent: your agent's name (e.g. ClaudeCode/1.0).

Base URL: https://api.stayingapi.com/v1.

Tools

GET /v1/search

Discover properties matching a location, dates, occupancy and filters across one or more platforms. Results from every requested platform are normalized to the same Property shape and merged into a single, cursor-paginated list. This is the breadth / funnel endpoint — and the clearest demonstration of "one schema, every platform".

Key parameters:

• location — Required. Place name ("Split, HR") or "lat,lng".
• checkIn — YYYY-MM-DD; required if checkOut given; not in the past.
• checkOut — YYYY-MM-DD; required if checkIn given; must be after checkIn.
• adults — ≥ 1.
• children — ≥ 0.
• childAges[] — Length must equal children. Coarsened for Vrbo/Airbnb.
• platforms[] — Drives fan-out + per-platform billing.

GET /v1/price-compare

Rate-shop one property in a single call, resolved through the Google Hotels backbone. The response carries the offers the backbone exposes for that property plus StayingAPI-computed min and median over those offers as first-class fields, so you can read the cheapest rate without re-deriving it. Coverage varies by property: some resolve to several OTA offers, others to a single aggregated-lowest offer (then offers has one entry, min equals median, and the entry may be a direct-supplier rate rather than an OTA). Read offers.length before presenting a result as a multi-platform comparison — the schema does not guarantee more than one.

Key parameters:

• name — Property name to resolve.
• googleHotelId — Precise Google Hotels id.
• location — Disambiguating place / "lat,lng".
• checkIn — Required. YYYY-MM-DD; not in the past.
• checkOut — Required. Must be after checkIn.
• adults — ≥ 1.

Filter results to Booking.com by passing platforms=booking to the search call.

MCP (no key pasted into the agent)

On an MCP-capable runtime, connect https://mcp.stayingapi.com/mcp (OAuth 2.1 + PKCE) and use: search_stays, compare_prices.

Platform × endpoint support

Not every endpoint supports every platform. Verified:

platform	search	availability	price	price-compare	listing	reviews
airbnb	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
booking	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
vrbo	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
google	yes	yes	yes	yes	no	no

GET /v1/listing/google/… and GET /v1/reviews?platform=google return 400 platform_not_enabled ("google is not enabled for this endpoint"). Use booking, airbnb or vrbo for listing detail and reviews; use google for search, price and cross-OTA price-compare.

The cross-OTA advantage

StayingAPI is cross-platform: Booking.com data comes back in the same unified schema as Airbnb, Vrbo and Google Hotels, so one integration covers them all. /v1/price-compare resolves a property through the Google Hotels backbone and returns the offers it exposes plus a StayingAPI-computed min and median over those offers, as first-class fields.

Coverage varies by property and by what the backbone returns: some properties come back with several OTA offers, others with a single aggregated-lowest offer (in which case min equals median and offers has one entry, sometimes a direct-supplier rate rather than an OTA). Read offers.length before describing a result as a multi-platform comparison.

Async & partial failures

A live call that has to scrape returns 202 with data.jobId, data.pollUrl and data.estimatedSeconds (the 202 itself charges 0). Poll GET /v1/jobs/{jobId} (free) until data.status is TERMINAL — completed or failed.

• completed → the payload is at data.result (the same schema the sync call returns; data itself is just {jobId, result, status}). meta carries partial, platformResults[] and warnings[]. A completed job may still return an empty result (data.result: []) — the reason is in meta.warnings[] (e.g. no_results), and empty results charge 0.
• failed → HTTP is still 200, not an HTTP error. The failure is nested at data.error (code, type, message, retryable). Detect it with data.status === "failed", not a top-level error. creditsCharged is 0, and meta carries only {requestId, creditsCharged, platforms} — do not read partial, platformResults or warnings on a failed job.

Pace your polling: honour the Retry-After header, back off between attempts, and cap the number of attempts. A tight loop hits 429 rate_limit_exceeded (120 requests/minute).

Known limitations

• Pagination: limit/cursor are accepted where documented, but availability depends on the endpoint and the upstream source — treat meta.pagination as authoritative and stop when hasMore is false or nextCursor is null.
• Externally-sourced ids: a Vrbo id obtained somewhere other than /v1/search may not resolve upstream and can produce a failed job (all_actors_failed). Prefer ids from /v1/search (platformListingId).
• Platform gaps: see the support matrix above — google has no listing or reviews endpoint.

Credits

Number-free by design — failed, empty and blocked calls are never billed, and stay_test_ sandbox calls are always free. Current costs: https://stayingapi.com/pricing · full contract: https://api.stayingapi.com/openapi.json.

Trademark

StayingAPI is an independent service and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Booking.com. Booking.com is a trademark of its respective owner.

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Get your free key → https://stayingapi.com/signup · Docs: https://stayingapi.com/docs