So we pulled 1,759 rental businesses from Google Maps across five Spanish tourist areas (Mallorca, Ibiza, Málaga, Alicante, Tenerife), downloaded each homepage, and looked for a booking engine. Result: 8% bookable. 92% can't take an online booking. A beautiful headline for someone selling booking software.

It was wrong. A plain download runs no JavaScript, so it misses every booking widget injected by a script, loaded in an iframe or living on a sub-page. We re-checked a stratified sample of 119 in a real browser, three passes each. The corrected figure: 68.9% cannot be booked online end to end (95% CI 56.9–80.8%, and it's a floor, because our "bookable" bar is generous). Of the ones that can, only one in seven runs an actual booking engine; the rest bolted a shop cart onto a car.

What I took from it:

• A homepage crawl overstates "no online booking" by a lot. If you see a study built on one, discount it.
• The error ran in the direction that flattered us. That's exactly when to check twice.
• Publishing the correction cost nothing, and the corrected number is one I can defend to anyone who checks the method.

Full method and data: https://renviq.io/en/guides/spain-rental-online-booking-study

The data is also on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23789643