The Early Stay bot

Early Stay helps students find hotels that will check them in at 18. To do that we read hotels' own published policies and quote the sentence that states the age, so a reader can check it themselves. This page says exactly who is reading, what we keep, and how to stop us.

How to recognise us

Every request we make carries this User-Agent, and only this one:

EarlyStayBot/1.0 (+https://earlystay.co/research)

We do not disguise it, rotate it, or send a browser's User-Agent instead. If a request claiming to be us does not carry that exact string, it is not us.

How to block us

Put this in your robots.txt and we will stop, permanently, without being asked twice:

User-agent: EarlyStayBot

Disallow: /

We read robots.txt before every host and honour Disallow and Crawl-delay. If we cannot read your robots.txt at all, we treat that as a refusal rather than as permission. A blocked property simply appears on our site as one whose age nobody has read. We never guess one.

What we do

• We fetch public pages only, and never more than one page per site at a time.
• We wait at least one second between requests to the same site, or longer if your Crawl-delay says so.
• We ask for a page again about once a week, and we send If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since, so an unchanged page costs you one small response and nothing else.
• If your page says nothing about a check-in age, we ask less and less often, down to once every three months.
• We honour 429 and Retry-After.

What we never do

• We do not bypass a CAPTCHA, a login, a paywall, or any anti-bot control.
• We do not use proxies to get around a block, and we send no cookies.
• We do not use private or undocumented APIs.
• We do not read booking sites' listings. Where a supplier's terms allow it, we take their published data through their own API under an agreement, and nowhere else.

What we keep

For each page we read, we store the URL, the HTTP status, one sentence quoted from the page, a hash of the page's text, and the date. That is all. We do not keep a copy of your page, we store nothing about the people who visit our site alongside it, and the quote is short because it is a citation and not a copy.

If an age on our site is wrong

This is the thing we most want to hear about, because a wrong age here means a student arrives at your desk expecting a room they cannot have. Write to official@earlystay.co with the property and the correct policy and we will re-read your page and correct it.

We would rather show nothing than show a number we cannot support, so if you tell us the page is ambiguous we will remove the age rather than pick a reading of it.

Attribution

Property names and locations come from OpenStreetMap contributors and are used under the Open Database License 1.0. Check-in ages are our own reading of each property's published policy.