icirellik / gencon-hotel-check Goto Github PK

This script polls the Gencon housing website looking for hotel rooms near the ICC, and alerts you in a variety of ways when available rooms are found. It requires Python 3+.

This was most recently updated for Gencon 2018. If it's currently a later year, I'll probably be putting out an update soon after housing opens. If that doesn't happen, you can probably figure out what to edit to get it working assuming nothing major has changed on the housing website.

The columns in the script's output are:

• Distance -- How far away the hotel is. By default only rooms in the "blocks" range are shown, as these are the only rooms the script will ever care alert you about, but --show-all will also show the hotels miles away. "Skywalk" means the hotel is connected to the ICC by a skywalk.
• Price -- The total price, before taxes/fees. Essentially the nightly rate times the number of nights.
• Hotel -- The name of the hotel.
• Room -- The description of the room. If the hotel has multiple rooms, there will be multiple lines in the output. The number in parentheses is how many rooms with that description are available.

To fetch and run the script, open a terminal (Linux, Mac) / command prompt (Windows) and run:

git clone https://github.com/icirellik/gencon-hotel-check.git
cd gencon-hotel-check
python gencon-hotel-check.py

If you don't have git, you download it as a zip file.

gencon-hotel-check.py --help outputs the complete list of arguments, but these are the most important:

• --key is the only mandatory argument, specifying your individual Passkey ID number. You can find this via the Gencon Housing page. Click the "Go to Housing Portal" button and you will end up on a page with a URL of the form https://aws.passkey.com/reg/XXXXXXXX-XXXX/null/null/1/0/null. Pass XXXXXXXX-XXXX as the key argument to the script.
• --checkin and --checkout specify the date range you need. The default is the days of the convention, Thursday through Sunday. Since Wednesday through Sunday is also very common, you can use --wednesday as a shorthand.

Once a hotel is found, the script needs to alert you in some way. It will output the matching hotel(s) with exclamation points next to them, but unless you're looking at the terminal at the time that probably won't help. You can specify any combination of the following options, multiple times each if necessary (e.g. to e-mail multiple people).

gencon-hotel-check.py --cmd CMD

Run the specified command, passing each hotel as a separate argument. This is probably most useful on Linux. For example, passing the path to this script will result in a libnotify popup:

#!/bin/bash
lines="$1"
shift
for i in "$@"; do
	lines="$lines\n$i"
done
notify-send -u critical "Gencon Hotel Alert" "$lines"

By default, the script looks for hotels near the ICC (where "near" means the distance is measure in "blocks", not "miles") that have rooms available in the date range you specified. There are a variety of optional arguments to narrow this down further if necessary:

• --max-distance specifies the maximum blocks away the hotel can be. If 4 blocks is the farthest you want to walk, use --max-distance 4. If you require a hotel connected to the ICC by a skywalk, use --max-distance connected (or just --connected).
• --budget specifies the max amount you're willing to pay. This is the sum of all the days (not just the daily rate), but does not include taxes or other fees. This means if there's a $200/night room available Wednesday-Sunday, you need a max budget of at least $800 to see it.
• --hotel-regex and --room-regex are regular expressions compared (case-insensitively) against the hotel name and room description. Explaining regular expressions would take a while, but here are some likely common cases:
  • To require that a particular value show up somewhere, just specify that value. To only show Marriott hotels: --hotel-regex "marriott"
  • To require one of a set of values show up, separate them with |. To only show hotels with double or queen beds: --room-regex "double|queen"