Schools, organizations, workplaces, and businesses curate a list of holidays to commemorate some festivals or events. And when they arrive, people want to go to places and enjoy their days, relax and take a break from the everyday hustle and bustle. So, if your business revolves around travel, you can leverage this craze for holidays to create solutions that can ease the life of travelers and cash out on these opportunities. You can build a travel application and integrate it with a holiday API. This will enrich your app with accurate and updated holiday datasets every time you need them. But what exactly is this holiday API, and how beneficial is it? Let’s talk about that, and then I’ll discuss some of the holiday APIs to build your applications.
What do you mean by Holiday API?
Before we talk about holiday APIs, let’s shed some light on APIs first. An Application Programming Interface or API is a software intermediary that allows an application to interact with another application. Using an API, an app can access data to interact with outer software components, microservices, or operating systems. It is an interface or common ground for two applications to communicate with one another. It contains a set of functions that delivers a user response to the system and again sends that system’s response back to the user. Similarly, a holiday API is a service where you send a request to other systems programmatically about various holiday lists across the world and receive the programmatic data instantly. Remembering the exact date for a holiday and maintaining the whole list is difficult. That’s why holiday APIs are developed to make the process easy. So, if you want a holiday in a particular country, you need to request it through code, and you will get accurate information. Let’s take the example of Christmas. In many countries, it is declared a public holiday on December 25 every year. But, in some countries, it is declared on January 7 of every year, while other countries might not have it. If you are a multinational company, an airline industry, a stock market company, or others, you must be ready for the future holidays to prepare your organization for events. With a holiday API, you can even get the data of past holidays and observances. Example of holiday APIs: Suppose you want to plan your Christmas holidays, and the destination is the Bahamas. You can either book your flight from your preferred airline’s website, if available, or use an online travel service like Expedia. The latter aggregates data from multiple airline databases by interacting with airlines’ APIs. This way, you can book your seats and plan your holidays.
What are the features of Holiday APIs?
Security
Security is a major concern for every app, site, or web service on the web. Since your application uses web services, hackers will try to fill up your API with millions of requests at a time and steal your information. Therefore, the holiday API you choose must have security features, like DDoS protection, to keep your information secure.
Performance
Modern businesses want to save time and effort in order to accelerate their processes and stay in the competition. This is why the API must offer decent performance. And to ensure that, you can check the feature list. You can also go for a free trial that most APIs offer these days or choose a free plan, if any. Next, you must check how many milliseconds this API takes to give you the data you requested. The less time it takes, the more will be its performance. Ideally, whether you are making many requests at a time or just a single or double, an API must take a few milliseconds to get accurate data.
Accuracy
API is a set of functions designed to produce correct data every time for your request. A holiday API must be updated and validated with changes in holidays so that no single user will miss the accurate data. If a holiday API offers precise date, time, and data, it can be good.
Documentation
An API is built by developers for developers. The holiday API must have good documentation so that a developer can read and comprehend its endpoints, methods, functions, and response options. Great documentation is also meant to be understandable by any consumer, even users with zero technical knowledge. Hence, it should have a good set of examples for each point or functionality. Good documentation also helps in integrating the API easily into your application.
Use Cases of Holiday APIs
Sales and Marketing: Holiday APIs help sales and marketing-based businesses enhance their sales conversions by giving promotions and offers around the holidays. Data Science: You can enhance machine learning models with the holiday API by feeding in holiday information. Shipping and Logistics: With a good holiday API, you can increase the accuracy of the shipping estimates and timetables of the product delivery.
Email marketing: Send smarter emails to your users by including local holiday information via holiday API in your application.Customer Experience: Communicate with your customers effectively by giving out the exact estimation about the service completion and fulfilling customer expectations. A holiday API also allows you to estimate the date and time, including the local holidays in the estimation. Inventory Management: You can identify your demand catalysts to enhance inventory levels and supply chain efforts. Demand Forecasting: Increase the forecasting models for accurate demand predictions.
Now, let’s check out the best holiday APIs.
Abstract API
Retrieve public, non-public, and religious holidays for more than 200 countries worldwide for any specific time of the year with Abstract’s Holidays API. With this holiday API, you will find historical and future holidays, which they update every week. Abstract Holidays API provides excellent documentation, multiple libraries, and tutorials so that developers will trust Abstract. In addition, its friendly API also gives you the power to run your business processes and workflows. You can also use the holidays API for ultra-fast speed and performance at scale. Its excellent technical support and reliable uptime help in getting your site live instantly, resolving issues, and keeping you running smoothly. It offers the most accurate and latest holiday data from across the world, covering over 190 countries and 3500 regions. Abstract’s holiday dataset gives you extensive information on holidays from 1AD to even the year 2050. You just need to specify your need in its API and get the correct information without wasting time. Since many countries alter their holidays, add or remove holiday dates, or change holiday names, you can collect updated and verified data using Abstract’s robust capabilities. Make 1000 requests free, applicable for 1 request/second. If you are a startup, you can make 50 requests/second or 500,000 requests/month at $19/month.
Holiday API
Listing holidays is hard, but Holiday API makes it easier for you. It helps you build your product easily, aggregate holiday information, and maintain it. Holiday API is built by developers for developers so that everyone finds that it’s easy to use. This API streamlines the process of finding information, loading data, and ensuring accuracy. It organizes and maintains your data in a single place and prevents manual processes that consume more time and effort. With Holiday API, you can improve your product. It will have your back whether you need past, present, or future listings of holidays. You will also get holiday data from more than 250 countries, including 3680 states and provinces. From year 1 to the year 2050, you will have every accurate data you need in more than 109 languages. Furthermore, Holiday API helps improve shipping and delivery estimates, block scheduling calendars, and better sales forecasting. You can access the API as fast as you need and whenever you want and also get up-to-date information and best-in-class technical support. In addition, Holiday API’s enterprise-grade infrastructure always provides higher uptime and more reliability. Get your free API key now and make around 1,000,000 requests every month.
Calendarific
Get access to local, public, and bank holidays with Calendarific, a worldwide developer-friendly RESTful API. It spans over 230 countries, including 3300+ states, with ease and supports more than 100 languages so that people worldwide can benefit from this holiday API. Calendarific delivers an incredible experience to the clients with its unparalleled holiday data. It also offers:
Speed: Its latency-based DNS routing helps serve more than 90% of requests in less than 10ms. Reliability: Its cloud-based servers that scale automatically can handle half a billion API requests every day. Up-to-date: All the data it shows is aggregated and verified from many sources. It regularly updates the information so that you will always get the most accurate and comprehensive working and holiday dataset without any effort.
This way, you can save the time and effort you can further use to improve your productivity. Calendarific has a flexible and simple pricing option so that you can choose any of the plans easily. Get 1000 requests/month at $0/month or avail of unlimited API requests at $10/month. You can also go for custom pricing to fulfill your unique needs.
PredictHQ
Access public holidays data along with other events information with PredictHQ’s Public Holiday API. It collects holiday data from almost 200 countries to deliver a seamless experience and offers many data streams in a single API. Since one holiday can vary from place to place according to the context, time, and date, PredictHQ’s Public Holiday API understands the variation to successfully provide accurate information within a second. So, instead of searching for a holiday in different regions, spend your energy improving your product. Download and store a local copy of the events for data modeling and analysis. In addition, you can enrich the same dataset to produce and sell your derivative works. PredictHQ also helps your business in many ways, such as demand forecasting, event visibility, workforce optimization, delivery optimization, visualizations, insights, dynamic pricing, and inventory management. Just Integrate PredictHQ’s API into your data to get immersive results and transform your business using the power of demand intelligence. Start searching for the holiday data for free with this API or build a customized plan by talking to an expert. Take a 14-days free trial to test PredictHQ’s API.
Time and Date
Time and Date’s Holiday API offers access to 7000 holidays and observances across 230 countries in different languages. You can download the data easily at local, federal, and state levels. When you make an API request, it quickly offers you information, including:
Holiday name and dateType of holidays, such as religious holidays, local holidays, or bank holidaysLevel of a holiday like local, state, or federalList of states or communities where the same holiday is observedA complete description of the holiday according to different countries.
If you are interested in just Time and Date data but not coding, you can download the data as an XML or CSV file. With Time and Date’s Holiday API, you can access the exact information to determine where business is open or closed for reliable planning for next year. Update yourself with data according to the date and time of federal holidays and other big events. The “On This Day” service or OTD service will let you know the historical, cultural, and political events that happened on a specific day. Whether you are building a calendar or informing about important dates to your users, using an OTD service will help enhance the user experience through the exact context of historical information. Airlines, tech giants, and global retailers use this solution to get accurate holiday databases in multiple languages to run their business. Choose your package starting from $99/year for 50,000 requests. Or, start your free trial today and test the accuracy.
Nager.Date
Nager.Date is a worldwide public holiday REST API that gives you exact information on the holidays from the past, present, or future and saves your effort. This is a project carried out on May 1, 2022, based on the .NET that provides public REST API so that you can make your request to know the accurate holiday data. Nager.Date currently supports more than 100 countries. Nager.Date is an open-source platform that is released under the MIT License. You can easily participate in the project to enhance its quality. In addition, host your own API instance if you need multiple requests simultaneously. When you make a request, say Year-2017 and CountryCode-AT, you will get a response within a second. The response includes Date, LocalName, Name, CountryCode, Fixed, Global, Counties, LaunchYear, and Type of holiday (public, school, optional, authorities, observance, or bank).
AnyAPI
Get a list of religion, public, and non-public holidays for different countries, states, and regions with AnyAPI’s Holidays API. It helps you retrieve a full list of holidays or request a specific date and shows the accurate date of the holiday for various places. AnyAPI offers easy-to-use and simple endpoints and supports more than 200 countries. It has a Datetime parser and validator that helps perform rigorous checks to ensure the data you get has accurate and updated information. Build your Holiday application with AnyAPI’s Holiday API and access different holidays at $0/month that includes 300 requests/month (1 request/second), DDoS protection, SSL, and API key authentication.
Festivo
Your users care about the holidays, so using Festivo will give you a list of holidays across different countries. It is a verification and data intelligence platform aggregating millions of sources and verifying them to give users precise data. You can use the data intelligence platform in your data models and projects to improve your products. You can also personalize examples and code snippets with the countries of your choice. In addition, use your favorite programming language and start making requests. Deploy your project within seconds with upgraded and updated information. Festivo supports more than 16,000 holidays and observances around 250 countries and 3500 regions. It is one of the most advanced and fastest holiday DaaS services which offers an average latency of 60 ms per request. Festivo gives you the most reliable and accurate information collected from its machine learning and AI-powered neural network. With the power of knowledge, you can know when your employees and customers are on holiday instead of waking them up on their holiday morning. You can implement Festivo in the AI assistant and see the holiday information. With a perfect holiday dataset, you can provide accurate shipping and delivery slots and allow your customers to welcome the package at their doorstep. It helps call centers offer better support while talking to the customers on holidays. It also enables you to offer promotions and coupons to boost your conversions around special occasions like Mother’s Day and holidays like Christmas and Easter. Create your free account on Festivo and choose from various plans starting from $16.58/month if billed annually. This includes 100,000 requests, commercial usage, holiday types, email support, HTTPS encryption, CDN-based API, and more.
Conclusion ✈️
Tracking holiday information from across the world is complex, but holiday APIs can simplify it. There are many advantages of using the best holiday API in your application, from saving a lot of effort to improving marketing. It can give you an accurate holiday dataset so that you can use this information to drive your business. You may also look at some of the Global News APIs for travelers to know what’s happening at their holiday destination.
