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I am working on a large project involving creating a worldwide hotel database with rich data such as Addresses, Images, Descriptions, Policies, Coordinates, Facilities, Reviews, Local area descriptions and their amenities etc.
I am looking for a public hotel API where I can both retrieve the data and run (preferably RESTful) real-time queries for specific locations and available rooms, and where I can subsequently let my customers make bookings.
Can anyone share experience, knowledge and possible guidelines for such a project, which APIs are suitable and what are the best practices?
In my search for hotel APIs I have found only one API giving unrestricted open access to their hotel database and allowing you to book their hotels:
Expedia's EAN http://developer.ean.com/
You need to sign for their affiliate program, which is very easy.
You get immediate access to their hotel databases plus you can make availability/booking requests with several response options, including JSON, which is more convenient and lightweight than the (unfortunately) more widespread XML.
As you immediately access their API, you can start developing and testing, but still need their approval to launch the site, basically to make sure it provides the needed quality and security, which is reasonable.
They also offer "deep linking", i.e. you may customize your requests by adding parameters. Then if it sufficient for your purpose (for mine it is not), you don't even need to store their content on your server.
I have also signed for HotelsCombined program:
(link removed as this site doesn't seem to let me put more links)
However, they do not immediately allow you to use their API even for testing. From their answer:
"Apologies for the inconvenience caused, but it’s simply a business decision to limit access to our rich hotel content. Please kindly check back within the next 2-3 months, where we will be able to judge your traffic, and in turn judge your status on standard data feeds."
I have also signed for Booking.com affiliate program:
(link removed as this site doesn't seem to let me put more links)
Unfortunately, again, they limit access, from their answer:
"Please do note that, since there's a high amount of time and cost involved in the XML integration, we are only able to offer the XML integration to a small amount of partners with a high potential."
I did not explore Tripadvisor as they seem only to offer top 10 hotels and only as widgets, but most importantly for me, they wouldn't allow booking through them.
I've checked the hotelbase.org mentioned above, they have very extensive list but not as rich as by Expedia, also they don't seem to have images and don't allow booking either.
I've used the TripAdvisor API before and its suited me well. It returns, per destination, a list of top-rated hotels, along with options to retrieve reviews, photos, nearby restaurants and a couple other useful things.
http://www.tripadvisor.com/help/what_type_of_tripadvisor_content_is_available
From the API page (available API content) :
* Hotel, attraction and restaurant ratings and reviews
* Top 10 lists of hotels, attractions and restaurants in a destination
* Traveler photos of a destination
* Travelers' Choice award badges for hotels and destinations
To expand upon #nstehr's answer, you could also use Yahoo Pipes to facilitate a more granular local search. Go to pipes.yahoo.com and do a search for existing hotel pipes and you'll get the idea..
HotelsCombined has an easy-to-access and useful service to download the data feed files with hotels. Not exactly API, but something you can get, parse and use. Here is how you do it:
Go to http://www.hotelscombined.com/Affiliates.aspx
Register there (no company or bank data is needed)
Open “Data feeds” page
Choose “Standard data feed” -> “Single file” -> “CSV format” (you may get XML as well)
If you are interested in details, you may find the sample Python code to filter CSV file to get hotels for a specific city here:
http://mikhail.io/2012/05/17/api-to-get-the-list-of-hotels/
Update:
Unfortunately, HotelsCombined.com has introduced the new regulations: they've restricted the access to data feeds by default. To get the access, a partner must submit some information on why one needs the data. The HC team will review it and then (maybe) will grant access.
You could probably trying using Yahoo or Google's APIs. They are generic, but by specifying the right set of parameters, you could probably narrow down the results to just hotels. Check out Yahoo's Local Search API and Google's Local Search API
Check out api.hotelsbase.org - its a free xml hotel api
No images as of yet though
Try Tixik.com and their API there. They have a very different data that big players, really good coverage mostly in Europe and good API conditions.
After several days of searching found the EAN API - http://developer.ean.com/ - it is a very big one, but it provides really good information. Free demos, XML\JSON format. Looks good.
Related
Is it possible to create a Kapow Robot that can search Google for the Operating hours of the Businesses from our list/database and update the timings if changes are made?
Please share if there are any other more efficient ways than the KAPOW robot that can be implemented with minimal effort and cost-effectiveness.
That's what the Google Places API is there for. While you could in theory just open Google Maps in a Load Page action, enter the query string and then parse the results, I would advise against it. Here's why:
The API will be faster, returning results in a structured manner (JSON)
Kapow has actions for calling RESTful services and parsing/modifying JSON
Google does not like robots parsing their pages, and most likely will lock you out (i.e. present you with Captchas sooner or later)
If you decide to go for the API, here's what you should do:
Get your API key first, see this page for details: https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/get-api-key. Note that the free plan allows for 1,000 requests within a 24-hours limit (https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/usage)
Maintain the place ids for all the businesses you'd like to query regularly, and update your list.
For each place, retrieve the details as described in the API documentation. The opening hours will be within the JSON response: https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/details
Update your list. I'd recommend using a definite type in Kapow for that, and using the actions Store in Database and Query Database. In case you need the data elsewhere, you may create additional robots (e.g. for Excel files, sending data per email, et cetera).
I am not familiar with API's so I was hoping someone could help me with a question I have. My company uses Greenhouse as their hiring software for people to apply and we are redoing our career site to be more custom. They want a page where we can display each department with a text icon that has the number of positions open in that department that updates itself and when you go into that page it wants to display the positions for that department a long with the location they are in.
In the Greenhouse.io API section they say
"This is useful for reporting purposes, or for customers who have
built their own tools that they want to use with Greenhouse. GET
methods include Offices, Departments, Candidates, Activity Feed,
Applications, Scorecards, Scheduled Interviews, Offers, Jobs, Stages,
Job Post, Rejection Reasons, Email Templates, Users, and Sources."
Does this GET method mean I can pull those pieces from the API and display them where ever we need to in the site and it will update automatically? I'm primarily a web designer so this info is a bit new to me.
The GET refers in fact to the HTTP methods. Generally, you call the api with GET to retrieve data.
If you want to insert a new data with api, you will use POST for instance.
You can see those http methods here:
http://www.restapitutorial.com/lessons/httpmethods.html
I'm a technical person with in-depth knowledge on Python and its framework. I've build an ecommerce store using Django-Oscar. I've multiple products in my store.
My store offers a large assortment of products in the Electronics category. A new and upcoming sub-category is surveillance and security systems. However, due to the varied nature of products in this category, the products are distributed across “Home Security” (Under Appliances) and “Security Systems”, etc. (under the Computers & Laptop > Office Equipment). A better understanding of the market segments is required for better positioning these products.
I reviewed Maplin, another e-store that provides same category of products on its store for better placing of my products.
Since I'm not a business analyst or a sales person, I want to get some recommendations/suggestions on how my e-commerce store can structure the products to increase conversion based on your review of the Maplin Storefront and my own product mix in this category. The constraint is that I cannot create a separate level 1 category for surveillance and security systems.
i tried Google on where should a particular product be placed to increase the conversion rate, but to little fortune. Also, I tried finding other SO portals where this type of question is a fit, but couldn't find any. So, if you can let me know the appropriate portal for this kind of question, it will be of great help!!! You can provide your recommendation/suggestions here as well.
Thanks!!! Appreciate your help!!!
register for google webmaster tools
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
-- then verify your website with google
take a look at google merchant center
https://www.google.com/merchants/
this page has links to google product taxonomy docs with categories etc
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160081
amazon is also worth looking at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200218500
next step would be structured data for the products
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1211158
http://schema.org/Product
This question already has answers here:
Is there an Amazon.com API to retrieve product reviews? [closed]
(8 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I am looking to extract all the reviews from Amazon.com. After retrieving I should be able to look for reviews by Product ID, User ID.
Please let me know if there are any APIs available to do this.
When a user posts a review on Amazon, that review becomes property of Amazon:
REVIEWS, COMMENTS, COMMUNICATIONS, AND OTHER CONTENT
If you do post content or submit material, and unless we indicate
otherwise, you grant Amazon a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual,
irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify,
adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute,
and display such content throughout the world in any media. You grant
Amazon and sublicensees the right to use the name that you submit in
connection with such content, if they choose. You represent and
warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the
content that you post; that the content is accurate; that use of the
content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause
injury to any person or entity; and that you will indemnify Amazon for
all claims resulting from content you supply.
Therefore, it seems unlikely that someone would publish an API that would, in essence, strip Amazon of their rights.
I want to maintain a database of all the products or the brands with respect to industry.
For example I need to get information about all the food supplements. How can I get them?
I am not sure all the companies have an API for their products.
Please advise
Uhm,... what kind of information? If you need prices, you can probably get information from goverment sources. At least you can here in Argentina. Other than that, I don't think it's possible, unless you somehow manage to scrape websites of all the brands you want to track.
Speaking as someone who has worked for two data-aggregation companies, aggregating data involves a lot of manual work. You find the sources, you automate the acquisition of data as best you can (APIs, file downloads and imports, even screen scraping from HTML pages), and you stay on top of it constantly. You're always looking for additional sources, updating code for sources that have changed, minding legal implications of sources who don't want you to harvest their data, etc.
Sometimes you have to buy the data, or weigh that cost against not having data from that source or scraping it manually. Sometimes a source will block you in some way and you need to either try to get around that or negotiate some terms with them. It's a viable business model, but it's not cheap.
For some products, Retailigence ( http://www.retailigence.com ) may have data in API form. They basically keep track of local stores' inventory and pricing for certain categories of products.
You should definitely check out Good Guide - an API that gives you access to details on over 60,000 household products.
http://developer.goodguide.com
DailyMed is a good service to check out if you're interested in products in the medical space.
http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed