CLI

booking <command> [arguments] [flags]

Run booking <command> --help for the full flag list on any command. This page is the map.

Commands

The read commands split across the two reliability tiers. The destination estate is reliable and reads from anywhere. The interactive client is best-effort and can hit a bot wall (exit code 4) from a datacenter.

Command	Tier	What it does
search <destination>	best-effort	Search properties by free-text destination. Emits Property cards
property <ref>	best-effort	Show one property by id or /hotel/ URL. Emits one Property
reviews <ref>	best-effort	List a property's reviews. Emits Review records
destination <ref>	reliable	Show one destination node. Emits one Destination
destinations <ref>	reliable	List a destination's child nodes. Emits Destination records
properties <ref>	reliable	List the properties on a destination landing page. Emits Property records
suggest <prefix>	best-effort	Autocomplete destinations and properties for a prefix. Emits Suggestion records
sitemaps	reliable	List the sitemap indexes Booking advertises in robots.txt. Emits SitemapIndex records, the root of the crawl root
sitemap <kind>	reliable	Enumerate a kind's landing pages from Booking's sitemaps. Emits Seed records, the crawl root
ref id <ref>	offline	Classify any Booking.com URL, path, or id into its (kind, id). Emits a Ref
ref url <kind> <id>	offline	Build the canonical URL for a (kind, id). Emits a Ref
serve [--addr]		Serve the operations over HTTP as NDJSON
mcp		Run as an MCP server over stdio
version		Print the version and exit

For ref url, kind is property, destination, search, sitemap, or sitemaps.

sitemaps reads robots.txt, the master list, and emits one SitemapIndex per advertised index: the index URL, the kind it enumerates, and the category of page it covers (place, property, reviews, attraction, beach, theme, car, flight, article, other). Booking advertises a few hundred indexes, far more than the handful of accommodation kinds, so sitemaps is how you discover every backbone the site publishes rather than guessing names. Each record's seeds_ref is the kind to hand to sitemap.

For sitemap, kind is any advertised kind, for example country, hotel, hotel-review, or themed-city-ski. Run sitemaps to list them all. Booking publishes a per-kind sitemap index that lists per-language shards, and each shard enumerates every landing page of that kind. sitemap walks the index, reads the shards for --locale, and emits a Seed per page. A Seed carries the edge into the rest of the graph when the page maps to a record: a place seed fills destination, a hotel or hotel-review seed fills property. A page outside the accommodations graph (an attraction, beach, or themed list) still comes back as a Seed with its URL and lastmod and no edge, so the inventory stays complete. Because a Seed needs no prior id, a crawl can start from sitemaps, walk each index into its seeds, and then follow the record links to reach the rest of the public site.

Reference forms

The commands accept these reference forms:

• Property id: <cc>/<slug>, for example gb/the-savoy, or a /hotel/<cc>/<slug>.html URL (an optional .<locale> may sit before .html).
• Destination ref: <kind>/<cc>[/<slug>], for example country/us, region/us/florida, city/us/orlando, district/gb/soho-london, or the landing-page URL.
• Search: the free-text term, or a /searchresults.html?ss=<term> URL.

Global flags

These are shared by every operation, so they work the same on every command.

Flag	Meaning
-o, --output	Output format: auto, table, markdown, list, json, jsonl, csv, tsv, url, raw
--fields	Comma-separated columns to keep
--template	Go text/template applied per record
--no-header	Omit the header row in table and csv
-n, --limit	Stop after N records (0 means no limit)
--rate	Minimum delay between requests
--retries	Retry attempts on rate limit or 5xx
--timeout	Per-request timeout
--data-dir	Override the data directory
--no-cache	Bypass on-disk caches
--db	Tee every record into a store (e.g. out.db, postgres://...)
-v, --verbose	Increase verbosity (repeatable)
-q, --quiet	Suppress progress output
--color	auto, always, or never

Booking-specific flags

Flag	Default	Meaning
--user-agent	booking-cli/0.1 (+https://github.com/tamnd/booking-cli)	The User-Agent sent on every request
--locale	en-us	The Booking.com locale
--currency	USD	The currency for prices
--checkin	(none)	Check-in date, YYYY-MM-DD
--checkout	(none)	Check-out date, YYYY-MM-DD
--adults	2	Number of adults
--children	0	Number of children
--rooms	1	Number of rooms
--cache-ttl	24h0m0s	How long a cached response stays fresh
--refresh		Fetch fresh and rewrite the cache, ignoring any hit

A nightly price is filled only when both --checkin and --checkout are passed.

See output formats for what -o, --fields, and --template produce, and configuration for environment variables and defaults.