The Scenario
You're a retail site analyst at a commercial real estate firm. Your director handed you an Excel workbook with 25 candidate store locations — addresses in column A — and asked you to score each site for "dining and entertainment density" before next week's investment committee meeting. The thesis: high TripAdvisor venue density within walking distance correlates with foot traffic and retail viability. Nobody has defined "walking distance." You decide on 500 meters. Nobody has defined a scoring method. You start with venue count and average rating.
The research itself is the job. What isn't the job is manually querying TripAdvisor for each of 25 addresses and tallying the results in a separate workbook.
The bad version:
- Geocode the first address by searching it in Google Maps, grab the lat/lon, plug it into the TripAdvisor API explorer.
- Note down the number of results and calculate an average rating by hand.
- Repeat for 24 more addresses. Try to stay consistent about what "within 500 m" means when TripAdvisor's radius results aren't always precise.
The investment committee meets Thursday. There are 25 sites. You're already behind.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the candidate addresses, queries TripAdvisor for nearby venues, aggregates the results, and writes the scores back to your workbook — no geocoding step required.
Search TripAdvisor for attractions and restaurants near each lat/lon pair in columns B and C of my Excel sheet and write the nearby venue count and highest-rated venue name into columns D and E.
What You Get
- Column B: total TripAdvisor venue count within 500 m of the address
- Column C: average TripAdvisor rating across those venues
- Column D: comma-separated list of venue categories present (e.g., "Restaurants, Attractions, Hotels")
- Addresses that can't be resolved: flagged in column B with a note so you can review the input
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
I need separate counts for restaurants vs. attractions, not a combined total
For each candidate address in column A, search TripAdvisor within 500 m. Write the restaurant count to column B, the attraction count to column C, the average rating across all venues to column D, and the top-rated venue name to column E.
My addresses include suite numbers and floor designators that may trip up geocoding
For each address in column A, strip any suite, floor, or unit suffix before searching TripAdvisor for nearby venues within 500 m. Write total venue count, average rating, and category list to columns B, C, and D.
I need to compare two radii — 500 m walkable and 1 km drive-time — per site
For each candidate address in column A, run two TripAdvisor nearby searches: one within 500 m and one within 1 km. Write results to two sets of columns: 500m count and average rating in columns B and C, 1 km count and average rating in columns D and E.
Score each site, rank all sites, and flag the top five candidates — all in one prompt
For each candidate address in column A, search TripAdvisor within 500 m. Write venue count to column B and average rating to column C. Then calculate a combined score in column D (venue count × average rating, normalized to 100). Sort the workbook by column D descending and mark the top 5 rows in column E as "Shortlist."
One prompt replaces the geocoding step, the API queries, the workbook math, the sort, and the manual flag.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your site-selection workbook. Ask SheetXAI to score each candidate location by TripAdvisor density before the investment committee meets. Also see: find nearby attractions for GPS coordinates or the TripAdvisor Content API hub.