The Scenario
You're a developer at a travel app startup. A product manager dropped a sheet in Slack two hours ago: 50 hotels with their GPS coordinates, latitude in column B, longitude in column C. The feature shipping next sprint needs a pre-populated nearby-attractions table — top 10 TripAdvisor results within 1 km of each hotel, with name, category, and rating. The PM wants the table by end of day so the design team can start on the card layout.
This is exactly the kind of task that sounds like it should take 20 minutes and somehow takes four hours when you try to do it by hand.
The bad version:
- Open the TripAdvisor developer portal, find the nearby-location endpoint, test a sample call for the first hotel.
- Write a small script to loop through all 50 rows, hit the API, parse the response, expand into child rows.
- Discover that the script writes 10 rows per hotel but flattens the coordinate source, so you can't tell which attractions belong to which hotel without going back in.
That's debugging time you don't have. The design team is waiting.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your coordinate pairs, queries TripAdvisor for nearby locations, and expands the results into the sheet — each set of 10 results linked back to the source hotel row.
For each row in my sheet (latitude in column B, longitude in column C), search TripAdvisor for the nearest 10 locations and append them as new rows with name, category, rating, and distance in km.
What You Get
- 10 new rows per hotel, appended below the source row or written to a separate tab depending on how you phrase the prompt
- Column for source hotel name or row reference carried forward
- Column A: nearby venue name
- Column B: category (e.g. "Hotel," "Restaurant," "Attraction")
- Column C: TripAdvisor overall rating
- Column D: distance in km from the source coordinate pair
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
My coordinates are in a single column formatted as "lat,lon" strings
For each row in my sheet, the coordinate pair is in column B as a "lat,lon" string. Parse the latitude and longitude from column B, then search TripAdvisor for the nearest 10 locations within 1 km and append name, category, rating, and distance as new rows.
I only want restaurants and attractions, not other hotels
For each coordinate pair in my sheet (latitude in column B, longitude in column C), search TripAdvisor for the nearest 10 restaurants and attractions within 1 km — exclude hotels. Append the results as new rows with venue name, category, rating, and distance.
I need results for two different radius sizes — 500 m and 2 km — to compare density
For each coordinate pair in my sheet (latitude in column B, longitude in column C), run two TripAdvisor nearby searches: one within 500 m and one within 2 km. Write the results to two separate tabs — "500m Results" and "2km Results" — each with columns for source hotel name, venue name, category, rating, and distance.
I want coordinates looked up, nearby venues fetched, and a density score calculated in one shot
For each hotel in column A, the GPS coordinates are in columns B and C. Search TripAdvisor for the nearest 10 locations within 1 km. Write the expanded results to the Nearby tab. Then return to the source sheet and add a column D with a density score: total number of nearby results found, and a column E with the average rating of those results.
SheetXAI handles the expansion, the aggregation, and the writeback in a single pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your hotel coordinates sheet. Ask for the nearby-attractions expansion and hand the output to your design team before the end of the day. Also see: export top-rated venues for a destination or the TripAdvisor Content API hub.