Analyze Real Time Hotel Availability Data using Excel
The Expedia Affiliate Network is an excellent source of Hotel information and has REST API’s that you can use in Excel 2013 via Power Query. You can register for an account via https://developer.ean.com/
Once you register for an API key, you can review the API documentation for Hotel Lists at https://developer.ean.com/docs/hotel-list/. The Query string that I used for getting a list of all available hotels in Seattle was:
&city=Seattle&stateProvinceCode=WA&countryCode=US&supplierCacheTolerance=MED_ENHANCED
There are various parameters that you can experiment with to get variations of the data that includes hotel availability for specific dates or with specific amenities and so on.
Once you import the data into Excel, you can analyze the data using Power View or Power Map to slice and dice the data and make data-driven decisions. Here is an example of a visualization that I put together with Power View.
