pricewin-hotel-deal-finder

PriceWin Hotel Deal Finder

Compare live hotel prices across Booking.com, Agoda, Google Hotels & OpenTravel in one command — and get back ranked best-value, cheapest, and quality picks with direct booking links.

Stop opening five OTA tabs to find the real cheapest rate. Ask your agent "find me a hotel in Tokyo for 12–15 Aug, 2 guests" and this skill returns a clean, ranked comparison in ~30–60 seconds (cached cities).

Invoke this skill for questions like:

• "What's the cheapest hotel in <city> for <dates>?"
• "Is Booking.com or Agoda cheaper for this hotel?"
• "Compare hotel prices for <city>, <N> guests."
• "Find me a hotel under $<X>/night in <city>."
• "Best-value place to stay near <landmark> on <dates>?"

Each returns the same one-command answer below — no clarifying round-trip needed.

What you get from one command:

• 🥇 Best value · 🥈 Cheapest · 🥉 Quality — picked side-by-side
• Real per-night prices from up to 4 sources, normalized to USD
• Clickable booking links straight to the cheapest OTA for each hotel
• Works for any city worldwide — including bot-hardened ones (Shanghai, Hangzhou, Bangkok…) via a stealth Patchright daemon
• No API keys, no MCP server — node/npx is all you need

Sample result:

🏨 Tokyo • Aug 12–15 • 3 nights • 2 guests
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🥇 BEST VALUE
Shinjuku Granbell Hotel
  ✅ agoda      💰 $118/night
     booking    💰 $131/night
     → Save $13 vs Booking
🥈 CHEAPEST
APA Hotel Shinjuku
  ✅ google     💰 $94/night
📊 18 hotels | agoda, booking, google, opentravel • prices in USD

Install:

npx skills add

How to use this skill

One command does the whole job — you normally won't need to ask clarifying questions first. Infer the parameters (below) and run it:

{baseDir} is this skill's install directory (auto-resolved by the runtime). If your runtime does not substitute it, cd into the folder that contains this SKILL.md (the one with bin/search.js). Avoid hardcoding a ~/.hermes/... or ~/.openclaw/... path — it differs per platform.

Example:

The script handles everything automatically: daemon launch, Agoda cache lookup, Google + Booking inline search, OpenTravel API lookup (all cities), discovery for new cities, and formatted tier-card output. Run it and send the output to the user.

Infer the parameters instead of asking (ask only if the city or dates are genuinely ambiguous):

• Year: use the current year from today's date unless the user states otherwise. If the requested day/month has already passed this year, assume next year. (Get today's date with date +%Y-%m-%d if unsure.)
• "10-13/6" → <year>-06-10 <year>-06-13 — fill <year> from the rule above
• "2 guests" / "2 people" → 2 adults
• Locale: language/region code passed to the OTAs (controls site language + region). Default en-us. Prices are in USD (Google Hotels is requested with gl=us&curr=USD); other sources follow the locale you pass.

One search.js run is the whole workflow — no Python, curl, or ad-hoc scraping is needed on top of it.

Operating rules — how to get reliable results

RULE 0 — Drive the browser only through search.js (via your terminal/shell tool). The native browser tools don't work here. This skill relies on a stealth Patchright daemon. The runtime's native tools — browser_navigate / browser_open, browser_click, browser_type / browser_fill, browser_snapshot, browser_close, any other browser_*, and subagent delegation (delegate_task / spawn_agent) — will fail on this task, so don't reach for them:

• Those native tools spawn a vanilla Chromium with no stealth, so Booking.com and Agoda detect the bot within seconds; the requests hang until the runtime kills them ("Command timed out after 30/60 seconds"). That burns 5+ minutes and returns nothing. The Patchright daemon that search.js launches survives bot-detection.
• Delegated subagents start with empty history and no skill context, so they fall back to Python/curl scraping that gets bot-blocked immediately. Run the skill in the current agent.

The one path that works:

RULE 1 — Let search.js do the scraping; don't scrape an OTA yourself. Avoid calling browse.js directly, doing goto/click/type in the browser, building Agoda/Booking/Google URLs by hand, calling the OpenTravel API separately, or launching the daemon yourself. search.js already drives the stealth daemon through a careful flow that survives bot-detection — it handles Agoda discovery internally for EVERY city (including Chinese cities like Shanghai, Hangzhou, etc.). Manually navigating an OTA is the #1 cause of failure: it trips Agoda/Booking anti-bot ("detect automation", "redirect to homepage", "problem completing your search") and gets the IP blocked. Run search.js once and send its output. If a source looks "missing", see RULE 4 rather than fetching it by hand.

RULE 2 — First-time city discovery takes 2–4 minutes. If search.js output contains "discovering" or "launching" messages, tell the user: "First time searching this city — discovering selectors, this takes about 2–4 minutes..." and wait for the result rather than retrying or aborting.

RULE 3 — Send the output exactly. search.js outputs formatted tier cards ready to send. Copy the output directly into your response. Do not reformat, summarize, or abbreviate it.

RULE 3a — Preserve the markdown hyperlinks. Every hotel name in the output is already wrapped as [Hotel Name](https://booking-url...) — a clickable hyperlink. Keep it intact: don't split the URL onto a separate 🔗 https://... line, don't replace [Hotel Name](url) with plain text, keep OTA names lowercase ("google", not "Google"), and keep section titles as-is ("📋 More good deals"). The output is Telegram-MarkdownV2-ready; sending it verbatim gives the user clickable hotel names with hidden URLs (clean UI).

RULE 3b — Hyperlink hotel names in your own commentary too. If you add a suggestion or commentary section after the output, wrap every hotel name you mention as [Hotel Name](url) using the same URL the script printed for that hotel, rather than plain text.

RULE 4 — Partial results are normal — send them as-is rather than fixing by hand. A source can be absent from a run (e.g. Agoda blocked this run, or OpenTravel has no inventory for the city). That's fine — send the tier cards with whatever sources are present; the footer (📊 N hotels | <sources> • prices in USD) lists exactly what was found. Fetching the missing source via the browser or a direct URL tends to trip anti-bot and make things worse, so avoid it. If search.js errors out entirely, tell the user what failed in one line and show any partial output it printed above the error. For more coverage, the one reliable retry is running the same search.js command again (anti-bot is often transient).

Output Format Reference

search.js prints tier cards in this format — you send this directly to the user:

The hotel name is a Markdown link to its cheapest OTA. Price rows carry NO links and the OTA key is shown lowercase (agoda/booking/google/opentravel). There are no star ratings or area lines — the script does not have that data.

All prices are shown in USD. Agoda, Google and OpenTravel geo-lock to VND by IP and are converted via a live FX rate; Booking returns USD natively. Only sources that actually returned data are listed in the footer.

Limitations

• First search per city pays the Agoda discovery cost (2–4 minutes). Google and Booking are inline (no discovery); OpenTravel is a direct API call.
• Subsequent searches reuse the Agoda cache and complete in ~30–60 seconds.

Security & data handling

Runs locally, needs no API keys, and collects no personal data — the only data sent out is the search query (city, dates, guests). Scraped hotel text is treated as untrusted: sanitizeText() in bin/search.js strips control/zero-width/bidi and markdown-control characters before any of it reaches model output, and booking links are restricted to http(s).

The local browser daemon is loopback-only, token-authenticated (a per-run token in a 0600 state file), rejects non-loopback Host headers against DNS rebinding, and keeps the Chromium sandbox enabled — --no-sandbox is used only where it cannot work (root on Linux, or explicit PRICEWIN_NO_SANDBOX=1).

Full disclosure of commands run, downloads, and network egress is in SECURITY.md.