Holidays information can be difficult to maintain and can sometimes get in the way of building your products. Using Holidays APIs like AbstractAPI can help you solve this problem. This holiday API has a database of important holidays in almost all countries worldwide.
Holiday APIs can be easily implemented in your mobile and desktop app, and you're good to go. This article features everything you need to know about holidays API: what it is, how to use it, and use cases.
What is Holidays API?
Holidays API is a simple to use API that provides access to a list of past and future public holidays for every country in the world. Abstract’s Holiday API contains data for over 195 countries, as well as 600+ states and provinces for decades in the future and the past. The dates, names, and other details of holidays change, and the Abstract Holiday API makes it easy to stay on top of these changes without investing much time or effort.
Using Holiday API to Look For Holidays of Any Country
There are a lot of holiday APIs providing different features. However, the mode of use for many is similar. Here, we will be using AbstractAPI's holidays API as a case study. Abstract's Public Holiday API is a modern, and RESTful JSON API for getting the public and religious holidays for a host of countries in the world.
It's very simple to use: you only need to submit your API key and a country, and the API will return the public holidays for that country. Additional parameters -- such as year, month, and day can be specified to determine what holidays exist in a specific timeframe.
On the Abstract Holiday API page, you can get a free API key by registering a free account.
After copying your Unique API key, to authenticate your request, you need to append your API key to the base URL.
Here is an example from API documentation page:
You request the country of interest with your API key and country name.
A successful request will yield a response as in the image below, showing a full list of holidays for the requested country with details of the current year.
Finding Holidays For A Specific Year And Month
Abstract holiday API has an option for you to request holidays for a specific date or year. See the example below.
A successful request will yield a response as in the image below, showing the public holiday for the date requested.
Top Applications and Use Cases Of Holiday API
While there are many use cases for this API, here is a list of the most common ones:
Sales & Marketing - offer promotions around the holidays, personalizing emails and chats once you have identified the user's location through IP Geolocation API.
Customer Experience - improve expectations around service availability, such as support and operations
Shipping & Logistics - improve the accuracy of your shipping estimates and delivery timetables.
Data Science - Enhance your machine learning for better trend detection and prediction
Closing Thoughts
Holidays API can be very useful, not to mention its ease of implementation. You can use it in any of your mobile or desktop applications that requires holidays data.
