Barcelona was one of the first destinations to implement a new regulatory framework for tourist properties, standardising urban criteria and the management of the destination's tourist accommodation.

As in the case of the digital marketing organisation (DMO) visitBerlin, web scraping technology was used in collaboration with a specialised company to monitor digital platforms for tourist accommodation and spot offers for tourist properties being marketed in the destination.

Web scraping systems or IT programs automatically perform real-time checks of platforms such as Airbnb or HomeAway via their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

This extracted and compiled information is added to a directory so that, at a later date, the results obtained at a specific moment can be compared with the historic data stored in a data warehouse or platform. Finally, the information is updated so for analysis and to obtain results.

The use of web scraping techniques is an innovative alternative to measure and understand the phenomenon of properties for tourists, in additional to identifying illegal properties and understanding the real impact of regulations implemented in the destination with regard to tourist accommodation.