I’m trying to setup a simple php script (below) to check when a certain property becomes available on booking.com.
The site seems to work with some pretty simple query parameters – you can just go directly to eg https://www.booking.com/searchresults.en-gb.html?ss=New+York&checkin=2026-03-01&checkout=2026-03-05&group_adults=2 and it will process the search correctly, no need to be logged in, or click through from the previous search page etc.
But the following script just returns empty search results, with no search parameters filled in:
<?php
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 180;
$url="https://www.booking.com/searchresults.en-gb.html?ss=New+York&checkin=2026-03-01&checkout=2026-03-05&group_adults=2";
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION , 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $output;
?>
Not sure if it’s down to booking.com implementing some kind of anti-bot protection behind the scenes which is actively blocking it, or if there’s just some simple thing I’m missing?