Member Avatar for ksbr

Hello,

I am building a travel website and I would like to add an events feature to it like the one Hotwire just developed: www.hotwire.com/tripstarter/index.jsp

I would like to automatically feed events data in my website without having to type each of them in manually.

Are you aware of any events data provider (like timeout magazine) that provides this kind of service(possibly for free)?

Thx for your time

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Dani AI

Generated

Quick practical advice for (and thanks to for flagging news feeds versus event feeds): there are three realistic ways to populate an events panel automatically — pick one or mix them.

  • Use public ticketing/event APIs for broad coverage (examples: Eventbrite, Ticketmaster) or niche APIs like Meetup. These give structured fields (start/end, venue, lat/lon, ticket URL) and are easiest to keep fresh.
  • Buy a normalized feed/aggregator if you need reliable, de-duplicated coverage across sources (PredictHQ is one such provider).
  • Harvest venue/city calendars, RSS/iCal feeds and JSON-LD/schema.org/Event on site pages. This is low-cost and often high-quality for local events, but requires normalization and ongoing scraping/monitoring.

Important practical steps and cautions:

  • Start small (one city) to tune dedupe and timezone handling.
  • Normalize fields: title, start/end (store in UTC + original timezone), venue name and lat/lon, and external IDs.
  • Deduplicate across sources by a simple canonical key (normalized title + start_time_utc + normalized venue).
  • Respect API rate limits and terms of service (many APIs restrict caching/display or require attribution).
  • Handle recurring events and exceptions (iCal RRULEs or provider recurrence fields).
  • Offer an editorial queue for bad or spammy feeds and show source/affiliate links where required.

Quick dedupe pseudocode:

def normalize(s):
    return re.sub(r'\W+', ' ', (s or '')).strip().lower()

key = normalize(title) + '|' + start_time_utc.isoformat() + '|' + normalize(venue_name)
if exists_in_db(key):
    update_event()
else:
    insert_event()

For structured-data harvesting, look for schema.org/Event JSON-LD on venue pages and consume iCal feeds from venue/tourism sites. Test for timezone mismatches and recurring exceptions before scaling.

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Member Avatar for Dani

None that I know of for actual events. Try Moreover for news feeds though. They used to have feeds about every subject imaginable, but I'm not sure if they still even provide that service.

Member Avatar for ksbr

Thank you very much that was really useful

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