Google Travel API: Get Destination Ideas with Flight Prices as JSON in 2026

Most flight tools answer "how much to fly from A to B?" The more interesting question is "where can I even go?", and Google Travel Explore answers it beautifully: a map of destinations from your airport with flight prices, hotel prices, and suggested dates. Beautifully, but only in a browser. The Google Travel Explore API on Apify turns that surface into structured JSON: one ranked destination list per departure airport.

Disclosure: the Apify links in this post are affiliate links. If you run the Actor, I may earn a referral commission at no extra cost to you.

Is there a Google Travel API?

No. Google retired its public flights API years ago and never shipped anything for the Explore surface, so there is no official endpoint that returns "destinations reachable from JFK with prices and dates." A Google Travel API today means a scraper you consume like an API: airport code in, ranked destination ideas out.

What the Google Travel Explore API returns

The Google Travel Explore API returns ranked destination ideas as structured JSON: destination name and country, destination airport with GPS coordinates, estimated round-trip flight price, estimated nightly hotel price, suggested trip dates, flight duration, and stops.

One run can batch several departure airports, and each destination row is self-contained enough to publish or feed to an agent as-is.

Who this is for

Travel content sites building "where can I go on a budget" features, agencies pitching clients ranked ideas instead of one-off quotes, newsletter writers hunting deals from specific hubs, and developers giving an AI travel agent real prices and dates to reason over.

The manual way, and where it breaks

Explore is an interactive map. You pan, hover, and read cards one at a time, and there is no stable URL that captures the result set you are looking at. Automating it means driving a JavaScript-heavy map interface in a headless browser and untangling how the destination data loads behind it, and every layout tweak resets your work. I tried to eyeball-copy twenty destinations into a sheet once and gave up at nine.

The faster way: run the Google Travel Explore API

Apify Console

1. Open the Google Travel Explore API and click Try for free.
2. Set departureId to an airport code like ATL, or batch several in departureIds.
3. Run it and download the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

REST

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/johnvc~google-travel-explore-api/runs?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "departureId": "ATL", "maxResultsPerDeparture": 25 }'

Run endpoint reference: the Apify API docs.

Get destination ideas in Python

import json
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("johnvc/google-travel-explore-api").call(
    run_input={
        "departureIds": ["JFK", "SFO"],
        "gl": "us",
        "maxResultsPerDeparture": 25,
    }
)

for destination in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(json.dumps(destination, indent=2)[:300])
    print("---")

Each row carries the destination, the estimated flight and hotel prices, the suggested dates, and the duration, which is everything a "where should I go" feature needs.

Cheapest places to fly from 20 major cities

The classic use case ships as a ready-made series: one saved task per departure city, twenty in all. A few to start from: Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, and Toronto. Each one runs the Explore lookup for that hub and returns the ranked, priced list; the rest of the series lives on the Actor's examples tab.

Export travel destinations to CSV

For editorial workflows the spreadsheet is the product. Export travel destinations to CSV runs a lookup and hands you a CSV ready for sorting, filtering, and publishing.

Use it from Claude and other MCP clients

The Actor is MCP-ready, so Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor can call it live: ask "where can I fly from JFK for under $400 with a hotel under $120 a night" and the agent filters real rows instead of hallucinating fares. You can read more about Claude and Claude Code at claude.ai.

FAQ about scraping Google Travel Explore

Is there a free Google Travel scraper?

The Actor bills per destination returned, and maxResultsPerDeparture (default 50, max 200) caps the count before a run starts, so cost is predictable. New Apify accounts include free platform credit, which easily covers a first exploration.

How does the scraper choose which destinations to return?

It returns the ranked list Google Travel Explore shows for your departure airport, localized by your gl and hl settings. You are getting Google's ordering, not a re-ranking.

Are the scraper's prices exact bookable fares?

No, and it is worth being clear about this: flight and hotel figures are Google's estimates for the suggested dates, built for discovery rather than checkout. For live itineraries and bookable prices on a specific route, pair it with a flights-level search.

Can an AI travel agent use this scraper?

Yes, it was built with that in mind. Over MCP the Actor becomes a tool an agent can call, and each destination row arrives with price, dates, and duration attached, so the agent can filter and recommend without extra lookups.

Can I schedule the scraper to track deals from my airport?

Yes. Save your departure airport as a task, attach an Apify schedule, and each run appends a fresh ranked list, which over time becomes a record of how prices and reachable destinations shift. Start from the Google Travel Explore API.

More from Truffle Pig Data

Explore answers "where"; two sibling Actors answer the follow-ups. The Google Flights API prices a specific route with real itineraries, and the Google Hotels Search Scraper covers where you sleep when you get there.

Wrapping up

Destination discovery data used to be locked inside an interactive map. The Google Travel Explore API returns it as ranked, priced JSON from any departure airport you care about.