How to get Tripadvisor Reviews from the API

Tripadvisor. A blessing when you’re choosing a brunch place, a curse when Karen leaves a two-star review because your croissants weren’t “French enough,” and ultimately, one of the most influential platforms in the travel game. All hoteliers know how to read Tripadvisor reviews, but we want to dive deeper and learn how to programmatically access them—a fancy way of saying: pull useful guest feedback directly into your database or Excel sheets using their API.

If “API” sounds like tech jargon, don’t worry—we’ve got you. Think of it like this: browsing Tripadvisor on Chrome is like dining in a restaurant. You walk in, wait for a table, squint at the menu, try to wave down a server, and maybe get what you want in the end. Using an API, on the other hand, is like ordering takeout online. It’s faster, systematic, and direct. No small talk, no queues, no guessing what’s on the menu. You tap a few buttons, and the kitchen sends exactly what you asked for—maybe even with a surprise cookie thrown in, because you didn’t take up table space.

For hoteliers and hospitality operators, that means you can pull your own reviews or your competitor’s—filtered, sorted, and structured—to analyze trends, monitor feedback in real time, or integrate guest sentiment into dashboards or CRMs.

Step one? You need to ask Tripadvisor for access. That means logging in (or digging up that long-forgotten password), creating an account, and handing over your credit card number. Don’t worry, it’s not necessarily expensive, it just feels more official when a platform demands your billing info upfront.

Next, we’ll look at what you can actually do with those reviews once you’re in.

Welcome to the Kingdom

Once you’ve sacrificed your credit card to the Tripadvisor gods (don’t worry, they won't charge you just yet), the gates begin to open. Your prize? An API key—a long string of characters that acts as your VIP pass to Tripadvisor’s data vault.

But before you go on a clicking spree, there’s one more step: domain restrictions. Think of this like telling Tripadvisor, “Only these specific doors are allowed to use my key.” It’s a simple way to prevent misuse and keep things secure. Set those up in your dashboard, and you're ready to roll for now. In the future, you will need add “Referer” header with the domain you have added, but we will not worry about it for now.

Now, copy that API key and head over to the documentation—Tripadvisor’s official guidebook for what’s possible. There, you’ll see all the available endpoints (i.e., services you can request) in the bottom. This is where the magic happens. You can see this as a playground to try out the services or small parts of the restaurant’s dishes before you fork out your hard-earned money.

Paste your API key in, hit “Try it,” and boom—you just made your first API call. Somewhere, a developer just shed a tear of joy.

Welcome to the world of structured data. It only gets more powerful and honestly, confusing from here.

Alright, now that you’ve stepped into the kingdom, let’s talk about how to ask for what you want—politely and efficiently.

In API language, two common terms you'll encounter are offset and limit. Picture this: you’ve got a neatly stacked row of books stretching from left to right. Offset is where you start counting from the left, and limit is how many books you’re allowed to grab in one go. Tripadvisor, in all its caution, only lets you grab five books at a time—no more.

So if you want reviews 6 to 10, you’d set your offset to 5 and your limit to 5. Easy, right?

Well... kind of. At the time of writing, the offset-limit combo appears a little buggy. Sometimes it skips, sometimes it returns too many, sometimes it returns less than expected. Still TBD if this is a feature, a bug, or just Tripadvisor being temperamental.

Now, to fetch reviews, you’ll need a location ID—Tripadvisor’s internal reference for each hotel, restaurant, or attraction. The easiest way to get this? Find the location’s URL, and extract the ID directly from it (see image below for the treasure map).

And here’s a neat dev trick: Tripadvisor’s API playground gives you a "curl" command for each request. Curl is a command-line tool that developers use to talk to nearly anything on the internet—from APIs to coffee machines. Even better? Many platforms let you import data directly from curl requests, making it a one-click bridge from Tripadvisor to your software. Copy, paste, and you’re in business.

Now, about that curl… here comes the fine print. When you step outside the cozy playground and run these API calls on your own, you’ll need to include a Referer header in your request. This tells Tripadvisor where the call is coming from—and it must match one of the domains you set earlier in your account settings.

So yes, that “try it anywhere” magic was a bit of a white lie. But now you’re officially in the real world of APIs—headers, confusion, and all.