Short-term-rental DATA · live availability + price · REST + MCP
Short-term rental data that’s live — not last quarter’s analytics.
AirDNA and AirROI tell you how a market performed — historical occupancy, ADR, RevPAR. ScoutingAPI tells you what’s bookable right now: live search, availability, and price across Airbnb and Vrbo, in one unified schema, with cross-OTA price-compare.
Live availability + price, not analytics · 100 credits free, no card · failed or empty calls cost 0 credits
GET /v1/availability
?platform=airbnb
&listingId=42307961
&startDate=2026-07-13&endDate=2026-07-20{
"data": [
{
"platform": "airbnb",
"listingId": "42307961",
"dates": [
{ "date": "2026-07-13", "available": true, "minNights": 7,
"checkIn": true, "checkOut": false, "bookable": true },
{ "date": "2026-07-14", "available": true, "minNights": 7,
"checkIn": false, "checkOut": false, "bookable": true },
{ "date": "2026-07-20", "available": true, "minNights": 7,
"checkIn": false, "checkOut": true, "bookable": true }
]
}
],
"meta": {
"platforms": ["airbnb"], "cached": false, "creditsCharged": 3, "currency": "EUR",
"platformResults": [{ "platform": "airbnb", "status": "ok", "count": 1 }],
"pagination": null
}
}Show, don’t sell
Is it bookable, day by day — the question analytics can’t answer.
This is an actual /v1/availability response for a real short-term rental. Each day carries available, minNights, checkIn/checkOut eligibility, and a computed bookable flag — the live signal a historical-analytics API simply doesn’t have.
dates[].availableWhether the calendar shows the night as open — the raw availability signal.
dates[].minNightsThe minimum-stay rule for that date, so you know if a short stay is even allowed.
dates[].checkIn / checkOutWhether the date is a valid arrival or departure day under the listing’s rules.
dates[].bookableThe computed “can it actually be booked” flag — availability plus min-stay and check-in/out rules resolved.
platform + listingIdThe exact STR listing the calendar is for, on Airbnb or Vrbo.
meta.creditsChargedCharged only on a successful availability call — 0 on a failed or empty one.
This is the difference between “how did this market perform” and “can my guest book these exact nights.” Availability, search, and price all come back in the same unified schema across Airbnb and Vrbo (add Booking and Google for hotels). An empty or blocked call would cost 0 credits.
Self-serve access
Instant access. No sales call. No $50k minimum.
AirDNA is enterprise-only with no public pricing (industry-estimated ~$50k/yr); AirROI starts at a $10 minimum. Airbnb has no public API and Vrbo’s is gated to property managers. ScoutingAPI is self-serve: sign up, get a key, make your first STR call in under five minutes.
100 free credits — no credit card
Enough to build and test live STR availability and price against real responses before you decide anything.
scout_test_ sandbox at zero cost
Deterministic Airbnb and Vrbo fixtures wire up your integration before you spend a credit.
No sales gate, no enterprise contract
Predictable credit pricing (Starter $19 / Pro $99 / Scale $499) instead of a $10 minimum or a $50k enterprise deal.
- 1Get your free key
- 2curl the /v1/availability example
- 3Ship
The trust wedge
Reliability you can build a product on.
Scrapers give you raw data and a shrug; analytics vendors give you a dashboard and a contract. We run a live-data product — monitoring, multi-actor failover, retries, and caching behind one contract.
99.9% monthly uptime SLA
Committed on the ScoutingAPI response envelope and published on a public status page. Multi-actor failover, retries, and caching sit behind one contract.
Failed calls cost 0 credits
Failed, empty, or blocked calls are never charged. If a listing’s calendar is briefly unreachable you get a typed upstream_unavailable and we charge nothing.
Live, not historical
Availability and price are fetched live and cached briefly for speed (availability ~6 h, price ~1 h) — not a quarterly analytics snapshot. Each response tells you what you got.
Runnable in five minutes
curl it, import the SDK, or hand it to your agent.
Every sample calls /v1/availability for a known short-term-rental listing and is copy-paste runnable against your free key, generated from @scoutingapi/sdk so it never drifts from the live API.
curl -s -G "https://api.scoutingapi.com/v1/availability" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer scout_test_YOUR_KEY" \
--data-urlencode "platform=airbnb" \
--data-urlencode "listingId=42307961" \
--data-urlencode "startDate=2026-07-13" \
--data-urlencode "endDate=2026-07-20"
# Day-by-day bookability for a known STR listing — the live signal analytics APIs don't have. scout_test_ is $0.The MCP tab adds ScoutingAPI’s native server (Streamable HTTP, OAuth 2.1 / PKCE) to Claude, Cursor, or n8n — then the agent calls check_availability({ platform: "airbnb", listingId: "42307961", startDate: "2026-07-13", endDate: "2026-07-20" }) and reads day-by-day bookability straight from the tool.
The honest comparison
Short-term-rental data: analytics tool, scraper, gated portal, or ScoutingAPI?
| Capability | ScoutingAPI | STR analytics (AirROI / AirDNA) | Raw scraper / RapidAPI | Vrbo / connectivity portal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | Live availability, search & price | Historical analytics (occupancy, ADR, RevPAR) | Raw scraped data, one site | Your own inventory only |
| Answers “is it bookable now?” | Yes — day-by-day availability + price | No — it’s historical | Sometimes (raw, unnormalized) | For your own listings only |
| Access | Self-serve, free key in minutes | $10 min (AirROI) / ~$50k, sales-gated (AirDNA) | Self-serve, but per-actor | Gated PM / connectivity onboarding |
| Platform coverage | Airbnb + Vrbo (+ hotels via Booking/Google) | Airbnb / Vrbo only | One platform per actor | Vrbo only |
| Output schema | One unified schema, every platform | Analytics-specific | Different shape per actor | Channel-manager specific |
| Cross-OTA price-compare | Yes — computed min/median | No | No | No |
| Reliability | 99.9% SLA, status page, failover | Vendor-dependent | None (~86% success, no SLA) | Platform-dependent |
| Failed-call billing | Free — 0 credits | n/a | You pay per attempt | n/a |
| Agent-native (MCP) | First-class MCP + OAuth + Connectors | No | Bolt-on per actor | No |
The honest read: AirDNA and AirROI are excellent at “how did this market perform” — historical occupancy, ADR, RevPAR — but they can’t tell you whether a specific listing is bookable next week; scrapers can, but you own the pipeline; connectivity portals only expose a manager’s own inventory. ScoutingAPI is the live STR data layer — availability, search, price, and cross-OTA compare — in one schema, with an SLA.
Built for real work
What developers and agents build on live STR data.
Not “extract listings” — the outcomes a specific reader recognizes, with live availability and price across Airbnb and Vrbo.
Investment & arbitrage underwriting
Combine live nightly rates and availability with your own occupancy model to underwrite an STR deal — using what’s bookable now, not last quarter’s averages.
Dynamic & competitive pricing
Benchmark a listing’s nightly price against comparable live Airbnb + Vrbo inventory for the same dates and feed a pricing engine that reacts to the real market.
Availability & booking-gap monitoring
Poll /v1/availability for a portfolio and surface open date ranges or last-minute gaps — then act, instead of reading a monthly report.
Price-drop & new-listing alerts
Fire a Slack, email, or Telegram alert when a watched listing drops its price or opens up dates — shippable from /workflows in minutes.
Portfolio benchmarking
Track a portfolio against its local competitive set — rating, amenities, price, live availability — in one normalized feed across Airbnb and Vrbo.
STR-sourcing agents
Give your AI agent a dependable live-data tool: “which of these rentals is bookable July 13–20 under €2,600?” → real answers via the native MCP server.
Answers
Short-Term Rental API — frequently asked questions
The questions developers actually search — answered in full, with FAQ structured data for rich results.
Get live short-term-rental data — not last quarter’s report.
100 credits, no credit card. Check a listing’s live availability and price in your first call, in under five minutes.
Live availability + price · failed calls cost 0 credits · native MCP included