The Scenario
Three months ago, someone on the data team started building a competitive benchmarking tracker for 80 restaurants in an Excel workbook. They got as far as building the workbook — name in column A, city in column B — and then left the company. The tracker is now yours. Before you can pull ratings, reviews, or photos, you need the canonical TripAdvisor location ID for each restaurant. The handoff notes say nothing about how they were going to get those IDs. You start clicking through TripAdvisor one row at a time. By row 6 you know this is not going to work.
The bad version:
- Search TripAdvisor for "Chez Maurice Paris," find the listing, copy the numeric ID from the URL bar.
- Paste it into column C. Open the next tab. Search for the next restaurant.
- Hit row 23 and find two restaurants with the same name in the same city. Guess which one is right. Note it as "needs review." Move on.
80 rows. 80 searches. Some with ambiguous matches. And this is just the setup step before you can do any actual analysis.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your restaurant names and cities, queries TripAdvisor to resolve each one, and writes the matched location ID and canonical name back into the workbook.
For every attraction listed in column A of my Excel sheet, find its TripAdvisor location ID and write it to column B so I can use it for review and photo lookups.
What You Get
- Column C: TripAdvisor location ID (numeric string, usable directly in API calls)
- Column D: canonical location name as TripAdvisor returns it — useful for flagging cases where the name doesn't match your list
- Rows where TripAdvisor returns multiple strong matches: a note so you can review and confirm the right one
- Rows with no match: left blank in column C with a flag in column D
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some restaurants in my list have duplicate names in the same city
Search TripAdvisor for each restaurant in column A (city in column B). Where TripAdvisor returns a single clear match, write the location ID and canonical name to columns C and D. Where there are multiple plausible matches, write all candidate location IDs and names separated by a pipe character so I can review them.
My workbook has restaurants across three worksheets organized by region and I need IDs for all of them
Search TripAdvisor for each restaurant in column A (city in column B) across the North, South, and West worksheets. Write the matched location ID to column C and the canonical name to column D on each worksheet respectively.
I have addresses in column C instead of city names for more precise resolution
Search TripAdvisor for each restaurant in column A, using the address in column C for disambiguation instead of a city name. Write the matched location ID to column D and the canonical name to column E.
Resolve the IDs, validate the canonical names against my list, and flag any mismatches — all at once
Search TripAdvisor for each restaurant in column A (city in column B). Write the matched location ID to column C and the canonical name to column D. Then add column E: if the canonical name in column D is significantly different from column A (e.g., different restaurant chain or different neighborhood), mark it "Review" — otherwise mark it "Confirmed."
That single prompt replaces a three-step manual process: lookup, paste, validate.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the benchmarking tracker that's been stalled since your colleague left. Resolve all 80 location IDs before lunch. Then use them to pull recent reviews for sentiment analysis — or go back to the TripAdvisor Content API overview.