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booking

Introduction

What booking is and how it is put together.

A command line for Booking.com.

booking is a single binary. It reads public Booking.com data over plain HTTPS, shapes the responses into clean records, and gets out of your way. There is no API key, so every surface is anonymous. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to run alongside it.

One web plane, two reliability tiers

Booking.com has no free public API, so booking reads the public website. That website has two tiers, and booking is honest about which is which.

  • The destination estate is the country, region, city, district, landmark, and airport landing pages. These exist to be crawled and read from anywhere. They are the reliable backbone and host the destination, destinations, properties, and sitemap commands. sitemap reads Booking's own published sitemaps and is the crawl root: it enumerates every landing page of a kind with no prior id.
  • The interactive client is the property page, reviews, search, and suggest. These sit behind a bot manager. They work from a residential or mobile connection, and are best-effort from a datacenter, where a wall returns exit code 4. When that happens, read the destination estate instead, which is not gated.

A nightly price is filled only when you pass both --checkin and --checkout. It is never invented.

How it is built

  • A library package (booking) holds the HTTP client and the typed data models (Property, Review, Destination, Suggestion, Seed, Ref). It paces requests, sets an honest User-Agent, and retries the transient failures any public site throws under load.
  • A domain (booking/domain.go) declares each operation once on the any-cli/kit framework. That single declaration becomes a CLI command, an HTTP route, an MCP tool, and a resource-URI dereference. It is the one place you add to the tool.
  • A thin cmd/booking hands the assembled app to kit.Run, which builds the command tree and the serve and mcp surfaces.

One operation, four surfaces

Because an operation is surface-neutral, the same property you run on the command line is also a route and a tool:

booking property gb/the-savoy            # the command
booking serve --addr :7777               # GET /v1/property/gb/the-savoy
booking mcp                              # the property tool, over stdio
ant get booking://property/gb/the-savoy  # the URI dereference (via a host)

You write the fetch and the record shape; the surfaces come for free.

Scope

booking is a read-only client over data Booking.com already serves publicly. It reads that data and shapes it for you. That narrow scope keeps it a single small binary with no database, no daemon, and no setup.

Next: install it, then take the quick start.

3 min read