Troubleshooting

Most of these come down to network reality or how Booking.com serves its data. booking maps each outcome to a stable exit code, so a script can tell them apart.

Exit codes

Code	Name	Meaning
0	ok	Success
1	generic	An unclassified error
2	usage	Bad flags or arguments
3	no results	The query ran but matched nothing
4	need-auth	The bot wall on the best-effort tier
5	rate limited	Booking.com is asking you to slow down
6	not found	The reference points at nothing
7	unsupported	The operation cannot serve this input
8	network	A transport failure reaching the site

Exit 4: the bot wall

property, reviews, search, and suggest read the interactive client, which sits behind a bot manager. From a datacenter that manager often returns a wall, and booking reports it as exit code 4 (need-auth).

There are two remedies:

• Retry from a residential or mobile connection, where the interactive client works.
• Read the destination estate instead. The destination, destinations, and properties commands read the country, region, city, district, landmark, and airport landing pages, which exist to be crawled and are not gated. They read from anywhere, so they are the reliable fallback. You can often reach the same property through properties on its city node rather than through property directly.

Exit 5: rate limited

Booking.com rate-limits like any public site. booking already paces requests and retries the transient failures, but a hard limit still means backing off. Raise the delay between requests with --rate (for example --rate 1s) and retry later. A burst of 429 or 5xx responses is the site asking you to slow down.

Exit 6: not found

The reference points at nothing that exists. Check that the input is spelled the way Booking.com uses it: a property id is <cc>/<slug> (for example gb/the-savoy), and a destination ref is <kind>/<cc>[/<slug>] (for example city/us/orlando). Use booking ref id <url> to classify a pasted URL into its (kind, id) before passing it on.

A price came back empty

A nightly price is filled only when you pass both --checkin and --checkout. With one or neither, the price and total fields stay empty by design. booking never invents a price.

The binary is not on your PATH

go install puts the binary in $(go env GOPATH)/bin (usually ~/go/bin), and a release archive leaves it wherever you unpacked it. If your shell cannot find booking, add that directory to your PATH. See installation.

Seeing what booking actually did

When something behaves unexpectedly, -v adds per-request detail so you can see the URLs it hit and the responses it got. That is usually enough to tell a bot wall apart from a rate limit or a genuinely empty result.