# Finding availability



## dri_daddyo (Jul 26, 2017)

I'm new on here and created an account this morning to post a thank you in the "Deed Back / Loss Mitigation" thread, since I was finally able to get rid of my DRI membership.  

My biggest gripe (in addition to the rising MFs, spam calls, spam emails) was that I could never find availability for the places I wanted to go.  

I would waste my time logging in and searching every day and it became tedious.

As someone in the IT field, I decided to do something about it programmatically...so I scripted together a handy little Python script that would log into my account every morning and search for Hawaii availability (since that's where I figured the best bang for my buck was).  

I input my arrival start and end dates, my resorts collection, number of nights, number of people, and number of max points I wanted to spend. 

I had it running for about a week last September and kind of forgot about it, and got a hit on my phone (I had it text and email me) while I was at work.  I promptly logged in to my account and booked a Big Island property, as a placeholder in case I couldn't get Maui or Kauai.  I then allowed the script to keep running.

A couple weeks later, I got another alert at work that availability at The Point at Poipu had been found.  I promptly logged into my account, canceled the Big Island property, and rebooked into the Point at Poipu.

The script certainly isn't anything professional, as it's crudely scripted and uses a combination of python and a web server of mine running on PHP (to allow for emailing and texting and storing search data in a DB), but I just thought I'd let people know that I found a small way to kind of "stick it to DRI" and defeat their antiquated search functionality.

The script uses a Chrome browser, so it can mimic a person logging in and searching.

If anyone is interested, I can provide the python code that does the searching.  I'd offer to search for availability for folks as a way to give back to this site, but it would require having a valid login to the DRI website (I don't have access anymore) and that's confidential information.


----------

