expedia-stay-search

name

expedia-stay-search

description

Use this skill when the user wants to search for hotels on Expedia by destination and dates, find available stays, check hotel pricing, or get a Hotel-Search URL. Triggers on "find a hotel", "search Expedia", "look up hotels in <city>", "book a stay", "hotel availability", or any request that implies Expedia stay search. Requires an authenticated Tabby browser session for the `expedia` profile; not usable as a generic hotel search tool for sites other than Expedia.

Expedia Stay Search

Search Expedia for available hotels by destination and dates using an authenticated Tabby browser session. Returns a Hotel-Search URL and extracted listings (name, nightly price, total price, rating, reviews, refundable flag, link).

This skill drives the real Expedia site inside a Tabby-managed browser via CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) instead of a Python HTTP client. That is intentional: Expedia sits behind Akamai, which blocks non-browser TLS fingerprints. Do not try to port the operations to httpx or requests — you will get 429 Too Many Requests.

Prerequisites

Before invoking any operation:

1. Tabby is running with the expedia profile. Verify with .venv/bin/python cli/main.py tabby session ensure --profile expedia from the noui/ directory. If that command fails, the user needs to re-run /noui-record-login for the expedia profile first — do not try to proceed without a live session.
2. PROFILE_SLUG=expedia is exported in the shell that runs the operation. This is the slug, not the DB UUID. The runtime reads it (or the --profile-slug flag) to fetch live credentials from Tabby.
3. The Expedia profile is ACTIVE. Check with the Tabby admin endpoint if in doubt — a STAGING profile returns empty credentials and the operation fails with "Tabby returned empty credentials for profile 'expedia'".

Operations

search_hotels

Search Expedia for hotels in a destination, on given check-in / check-out dates, for a given number of guests and rooms. Returns up to 25 listings extracted from the first page of results.

When to use: The user asks for hotel availability, prices, or a link to Expedia results for a specific city and date range.

Command:

python operations/search_hotels.py \
  --destination "Paris" \
  --check-in 2026-05-01 \
  --check-out 2026-05-04 \
  --guests 2 \
  --rooms 1

Prints a JSON object to stdout on success. Exits non-zero on failure with a diagnostic on stderr.

Arguments:

Name	Type	Required	Default	Notes
--destination	string	yes	—	City or place name. Expedia typeahead resolves it to a region ID.
--check-in	string	yes	—	YYYY-MM-DD.
--check-out	string	yes	—	YYYY-MM-DD. Must be after --check-in.
--guests	integer	no	2	Adult guests.
--rooms	integer	no	1	Number of rooms.
--profile-slug	string	no	$PROFILE_SLUG or expedia	Tabby profile slug. Override only if testing against a non-default profile.

Output shape:

{
  "search_url": "https://www.expedia.com/Hotel-Search?...",
  "destination": "Paris, France",
  "region_id": "178279",
  "check_in": "2026-05-01",
  "check_out": "2026-05-04",
  "guests": 2,
  "rooms": 1,
  "listings_count": 25,
  "listings": [
    {
      "name": "Hotel Le Example",
      "price_per_night": "$245",
      "price_total": "$735",
      "rating": "8.4/10",
      "rating_label": "Very Good",
      "reviews_count": "1,234",
      "refundable": true,
      "url": "https://www.expedia.com/..."
    }
  ]
}

Troubleshooting

• No Expedia browser session found. Is Tabby running? — no Tabby CDP target found at localhost:9222 matching expedia.com. Run tabby session ensure --profile expedia and retry.
• Expedia API returned 429: ... — Akamai is rate-limiting even through the browser. This is rare via CDP; if it happens repeatedly the Tabby session may need to rotate IPs or the profile needs re-recording.
• Empty listings, non-zero listings_count — Expedia changed its DOM. The DOM-scrape selectors in search_hotels.py ([data-stid="lodging-card-responsive"]) need updating. Report to the NoUI maintainers; do not guess at selectors.
• auth_plan.json missing profile_slug — this skill was mis-installed. The auth_plan.json file sitting next to noui_runtime/ must have profile_slug: "expedia". Reinstall the skill.

Notes

• This skill performs DOM scraping after navigation, not pure API calls. Results reflect what Expedia renders to a logged-in user, which may include personalized pricing.
• There is a ~7-second wait for the SPA to render results; a single invocation can take 10–15 seconds end-to-end.
• This skill is the reference sample for the NoUI skills-generation pipeline. Generated skills from real recordings will share the same layout (SKILL.md, operations/, noui_runtime/auth.py, manifest.json, auth_plan.json) but will vary in operation count and complexity.