Skill

airbnb

Search Airbnb and VRBO, find the host's direct booking site, and report the cheapest of three sources side-by-side.

Verified: 2026-05-13 (printing-press-ingest-2026-05-13+enrich-capability-skill)

When to use airbnb

Choose if

You want an agent to find short-term rentals across Airbnb and direct host sites in a single call, compare prices, and surface the cheapest option. Useful inside trip-planning agents that need to enumerate options and rank by total cost (including OTA fees) rather than call Airbnb's own API. No Airbnb account required.

Avoid if

You need to actually book a stay, message a host, or modify an itinerary — this CLI is read-only against the public web. Also avoid if you rely on VRBO data being trustworthy today; per the README, VRBO is currently returning placeholder/fake results until anti-bot evasion is restored.

Risk Flags

  • HIGH data_quality VRBO scraping is currently broken by Akamai anti-bot — the README warns that VRBO "returns hardcoded placeholder data with the queried city stamped on top — fake results labeled as if they were real." Agents must not trust VRBO output until upstream fixes this.
  • MEDIUM rate_limit Exit code 7 indicates rate-limited; README recommends --rate 0.3 (req/sec) when limits are hit. No explicit numeric ceilings disclosed.
  • MEDIUM auth Web-search backend selection (Parallel.ai, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Tavily) affects host-discovery quality; some backends need API keys to perform well.
  • LOW scope Read-only search and comparison. No booking, payment, or messaging via Airbnb/VRBO APIs.

Cost

Type: Free

Install

Default

npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press install airbnb
# Optional: configure a web-search backend for host-discovery
export PARALLEL_API_KEY=<key>   # or BRAVE_API_KEY / TAVILY_API_KEY

Setup docs →

Estimated time to first success: ~10 min

Dependencies

Minimum runtime: Node.js 18+ (or Go 1.26.3+ for source install); Chrome browser for cookie-based auth on protected paths

Distribution

Repository
https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library
License
MIT