feat(vrbo): add VRBO vacation-rental search skill via Patchright

[fyodoriv]

Why this is needed

The toolkit has hotel and Airbnb coverage but no VRBO source. VRBO carries professionally-managed condos and cabins (especially in resort/mountain towns) that often aren't on Airbnb, so for whole-home and group stays there's a real gap. VRBO can't be added the easy way: it sits behind Akamai Bot Manager — plain HTTP, @playwright/mcp, and curl all get a 429 Too Many Requests ("Provisioned request rate has been exceeded"), and there's no public API.

This adds a vrbo skill that beats that wall the same way the existing southwest / chase-travel / amex-travel skills beat theirs: Patchright (undetected Playwright fork), run headed, with a homepage warm-up + retry. No login required — VRBO search results are public.

What's included

• plugins/travel-hacking-toolkit/skills/vrbo/ — SKILL.md, scripts/search_vrbo.py (Patchright search + 3-layer extraction: embedded state blob → data-stid lodging cards → anchor fallback), Dockerfile + scripts/entrypoint.sh (headed via Xvfb), mirroring the existing portal-skill layout.
• SERP price parsing — splits VRBO's price string into pricePerNight + priceTotal with a priceIncludesTaxes flag (the SERP total includes taxes & fees — verified against live data).
• Robustness — detects both Akamai flavours (hard 429 + soft interstitial) so a challenge surfaces as a clear error instead of a silent empty result; scrolls + polls for lazy-rendered cards.
• compare-hotels — VRBO wired into the source table + workflow alongside the Airbnb MCP.
• Unit tests — 17 stdlib unittest cases covering the pure logic (URL building, block detection, price parsing, skeleton filter, enrichment). No browser/network.

Compliance with CONTRIBUTING.md

• Skill lives under plugins/travel-hacking-toolkit/skills/vrbo/ with the required frontmatter (category, summary, api_key) and no colons / quotes / backticks in values.
• Row added to scripts/skill-meta.tsv; README.md + llms.txt regenerated via scripts/gen-skill-tables.sh (not hand-edited).
• bash scripts/smoke-test.sh --quick passes every check applicable to this change. The only two red checks are pre-existing on main, not introduced here — stale data files (points-valuations / sweet-spots / transfer-bonuses past their TTL) and a timeout: command not found shim that only fails on macOS (Ubuntu CI has timeout). Both reproduce identically on a clean main checkout with no VRBO changes.

Test results

$ python3 -m unittest discover -s skills/vrbo/tests -v
...
Ran 17 tests in 0.000s

OK

Writing the tests caught a real bug — a missing import re the price-parser needed but that the one successful live run had never exercised (later runs were blocked before reaching it). Fixed in this PR.

Manual verification (browser path)

The browser-driven path can't be unit-tested without a live residential connection (Akamai IP-rate-limits datacenter / CI / VPN IPs). Verified manually:

python3 skills/vrbo/scripts/search_vrbo.py \
  --dest "Canmore, Alberta, Canada" --checkin 2026-06-26 --checkout 2026-07-02 \
  --adults 3 --json

returned real Canmore inventory with names, all-in prices (incl. taxes & fees), and booking URLs. The SKILL.md "Known fragility" section documents the IP-rate-limit reality.

Notes for the maintainer

• No Docker image is published. The Dockerfile is included so the skill matches the southwest/amex-travel pattern and can be built locally, but I have no ghcr.io push access — so docker_image is intentionally left out of the frontmatter and setup.sh, keeping the smoke-test image-existence check green. If you want to publish ghcr.io/borski/vrbo, I'm happy to add the frontmatter + setup entries in a follow-up.
• Unit tests are stdlib-only (no new dependencies) and run under both unittest and pytest. They're additive — the repo's smoke-test remains the CI gate; I did not add a workflow.

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🤖 Written by an agent, not Fyodor. Ping me if this looks off.