xdrr/hotsearch

Rapid search client for the lowest car rental prices

Hot Search

Need to rent a car and want the absolute cheapest daily rate? Hot Search is for you.

Hot Search finds the cheapeast possible rate price from the moment it's launched, by enumerating rental search options; namely time periods.

Historical usage of Hotwire.com has shown that specific dates and durations are significantly cheaper than others. Hence, by automatically enumerating through these search parmaeters it's possible to find the absolute cheapest car rental rate.

Installation

Create a python virtual environment and install HotSearch requirements.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Hot Search requires a valid signature from the Hotwire.com website. See Caveats.

With a valid signature, launch Hot Search specifying your location and currency.

For example, to search for cheap rentals as San Jose Airport:

python hotsearch.py -c USD -x USD -l SJC -s <signature value>

The cheapest price will be output and slowly improved over time, as better results are processed. The result value shown on the far right of a result line, can be entered into the following URL to book a car at the shown price.

https://www.hotwire.com/checkout/#!/car/billing/<RESULT VALUE>/?countryCode=us&currencyCode=USD

You may also stop the program (by pressing C-c) and a URL will be displayed for you to follow through to checkout.

Caveats

Currently, Hot Search requires a valid signature value to be specified so that API requests may be performed to the Hotwire.com site. The signature value is either an anti-CSRF token or API signing checksum that rotates every so often on the site. This means that Hot Search will only last so long before a new signature must be obtained and Hot Search restarted with ths new signature.

To obtain a signature, visit Hotwire.com and perform a search with the browser console open. On the Network tab search for sig. Find the /api/search/car/all request and copy the value of sig in the request paramters. Use this value with the -s flag when starting Hot Search.

The highest priority improvement is to comprehend the generation of the sig value so this can be performed in the Hot Search client automatically.

FAQ

All I see is "Bad response [403]: Not Authorized"

This means you've specified an invalid or expired signature value. Obtain a new value by following the process described in Caveats.

LICENSE

See LICENSE.txt