TripAdvisor Content API

Search and retrieve hotel, restaurant, and attraction data from TripAdvisor. Ratings, rankings, reviews, photos, amenities, subratings, trip types, awards.

Base URL: https://api.content.tripadvisor.com/api/v1

Rate limit: 50 calls per second.

Monthly quota: 5,000 API calls per month. Each curl request = 1 call. A full hotel lookup (search + details + reviews + photos) = 4 calls. Budget accordingly. Prefer search + details (2 calls) and only fetch reviews/photos when specifically needed.

API limits: Up to 10 results per search. Up to 5 reviews and 5 photos per location.

Authentication

First-time setup gotcha: TripAdvisor requires whitelisting your outbound IP at https://www.tripadvisor.com/developers before the key works. Without this, every call returns User is not authorized to access this resource with an explicit deny. This is the #1 first-time failure mode. Whitelist before troubleshooting auth or quotas.

• How to find your current IP: curl ifconfig.me
• Propagation: changes take 1-5 minutes (AWS edge cache).
• Multi-IP: residential CGNAT, VPN exits, and different networks each need their own entry.
• No Referer alternative: the free tier requires IP whitelisting; HTTP Referer restriction is not available.
• Verify which key is which: the developer portal shows the last 4 chars only (e.g. "Ends in 11D7"), so you can confirm without exposing the secret.

Set TRIPADVISOR_API_KEY in your .env file:

# In .env (gitignored)
TRIPADVISOR_API_KEY=your_key_here

Then source it before calling:

export $(grep TRIPADVISOR_API_KEY .env | xargs)

Error signatures