Learn BestTime in 90 seconds

Everything starts here, on Visitor Foot Traffic. You'll find three tools, and ready-made searches for your city.

The quickest start is Popular searches. Pick your city and a category, like Nightlife. Then open a search, for example busy bars on Friday night.

It opens in Radar. Each dot is a venue, colored by how busy it usually is at that hour. Press play to watch the city change through the day, and narrow it down with filters.

Want the pattern of one specific place? Use Forecast one venue. Enter its name and address, and you get every hour of the week, with its busiest and quietest times. One hundred percent is that venue's own busiest hour.

Not sure which venue types to pick? Describe what you need, like cocktail bars for a client event. AI suggests the matching types, and Radar shows them on the map.

Missing a venue or a chain? Venue category or chain finds venues that aren't in BestTime yet. It takes longer and uses more credits, so try the other tools first.

Save the venues you care about in a collection, to reuse them later. And every popular search shows the API call behind it, so you can build the same view into your own app.

Start with a popular search in your city. Each tool has its own short video in our help section.

Radar puts every matching venue on a map, colored by how busy it usually is. Open it from a popular search, or from Find venues.

Start with the area. Search a city or neighborhood, tick Nearby my location, or move the map and press Update map to search the area you see.

Then the venue types. Search them in the filter panel, like wine bar. Not sure which ones? Find venues suggests them from a short description.

Choose a day and an hour window, the whole day, or now. Press play to step through the hours.

Foot traffic filters keep venues above a minimum, or below a maximum, in any or all of those hours. One hundred percent is each venue's own busiest hour.

Add rating, number of reviews and price level, and sort by foot traffic, reviews or rating.

Only care about your own shortlist? Save venues in a collection, open its dashboard, and view it in Radar.

The list follows your filters. Click a venue to see today and its week at a glance, then open its full details.

Each search uses credits for the venues it returns. So start with a small venue limit, and raise it when you need more.

Every Radar view is also an API call. The next video shows how to use it in your own app.

Every Radar search is one call to the Venue Filter API. Here's how to make the same call from your own code.

On any popular search, click API. You get the request URL and every parameter. Copy it, and replace the placeholder with your private API key.

The parameters match Radar's filters: day and hours, busy minimum and maximum, rating, reviews and price, sorting, limit and page.

Set the area with a latitude, a longitude and a radius in meters, or with a bounding box: a minimum and maximum latitude and longitude.

For venue types, send broad types in the types parameter, or detailed types in detail types, but never both. The Venue Types endpoint lists them, without using credits.

To search only your own venues, add one or more collection IDs. Copy them from the Collections page, separated by commas.

The response lists each venue with its name, address and type, and its hourly foot traffic for that day, as a percentage of its own busiest hour.

Credits depend on how many venues come back, so keep the limit as low as you need. And round coordinates to two decimals, so repeated calls are served from the cache.

The full parameter list is in the API documentation. Next: one venue in detail.

To see when one place gets busy, use Forecast one venue. Enter its name and address, like the Empire State Building.

A new venue takes a moment and uses forecast credits. Venues already in BestTime come back faster.

At the top: its venue types, rating and local time. The bookmark saves it to a collection.

Today's chart shows the expected foot traffic for every hour, with the weather.

The live bar is predicted live data for the current hour. It's based on real-world signals from this hour, combined with the weather, events and holidays, so you can see if it's busier or quieter than usual.

The weekly heatmap shows every hour of the week. Green is quiet, red is as busy as it gets for this venue. Use it to plan a visit, a delivery, or staff for the rush.

Below it, the strongest peak and the busiest day, and a table that ranks each day by its peak and average.

Want similar places nearby? Click Nearby venues. Radar opens around this venue, with its venue types already selected. Choose a radius, and remove the types you don't need.

Or click a single type, like observation deck, to see just those around it.

You can also add this chart to your own site, report a forecast that looks wrong, and copy this venue's API responses.

That's one venue in detail. To see many venues at once, use Radar.

Add BestTime to your own website with a widget: a 3D map of the venue, with the hours when it's quiet or busy.

See it in action on the widgets page. Pick an example, like the Colosseum, and switch between the weekly heatmap, the map with today's hours, and the map with the whole week.

To make your own, open a venue in BestTime, click Share, and create a widget for it. Your account includes one free widget.

Make it match your site: light or dark, standard or compact, your own font and colors. And pick what it shows, like the clock, the peak and quiet times, or how long people stay.

For the 3D map, choose today or the whole week, and whether it zooms in on the venue and slowly rotates.

Then copy the embed code into your page. The guide covers WordPress, Wix, Shopify and plain HTML. You don't need an API key, and views don't use credits.

Travel blogs use it to plan a visit. Tour companies show the quieter times. City guides and venue websites show when to drop by.

And the 3D map makes a great backdrop for travel videos.

Widgets show each venue's forecast week and update automatically. Create your first one for free from any venue page.