UK FCDO Foreign Travel Advice Scraper

Scrapes all 226 UK FCDO (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office) country travel advisories from the public GOV.UK Content API. Returns structured records with alert status, safety and security guidance, entry requirements, health advice, and other per-country sections. No authentication.

What you get

Each record contains:

Field	Description
country_name	Country name (e.g. "Japan travel advice")
country_slug	URL slug used in the GOV.UK path (e.g. japan)
alert_status	JSON array of alert status codes (e.g. ["avoid_all_travel_to_parts"])
summary_html	Short GOV.UK description of the travel advice page
summary_text	Plain-text version of the summary
sections	JSON array of all advice sections: [{title, slug, body_html, body_text}]
entry_requirements_text	Plain-text entry requirements section (visa, passport, vaccination)
safety_security_text	Plain-text safety and security section
health_text	Plain-text health section
first_published_at	ISO timestamp when the advice was first published
public_updated_at	ISO timestamp of the most recent update
latest_change_note	Description of the most recent change
link	Canonical GOV.UK URL for the travel advice page
source_id	GOV.UK content ID (UUID)

Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
countrySlugs	array	—	Optional list of country slugs to scrape (e.g. ["japan", "france"]). Leave empty to scrape all ~226 countries.
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum number of country records to return. Set to 0 or leave blank for no limit.

Example inputs

Scrape a specific set of countries:

{
  "countrySlugs": ["japan", "france", "iran", "ukraine"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Scrape all countries:

{
  "maxItems": 0
}

How it works

1. Fetches the FCDO country index from https://www.gov.uk/api/content/foreign-travel-advice to discover all country slugs (when no specific slugs are provided).
2. Fetches each country's travel advice document from https://www.gov.uk/api/content/foreign-travel-advice/<slug>.
3. Extracts and flattens section content, change history, and alert status into structured records.

Data is sourced directly from the GOV.UK Content API — a public, unauthenticated government API with no rate limits beyond standard fair use. The scraper applies a 1 req/sec courtesy delay.

Use cases

• Duty of care / corporate travel management — monitor FCDO alert status changes for countries where employees travel
• Travel insurance and risk intelligence — combine with US State Department advisories for dual-government coverage
• Research and data journalism — track entry requirement changes (visa policy, vaccination rules) over time
• Comparison tools — pair with the US State Dept travel advisories scraper for side-by-side risk lens

Notes

• The GOV.UK Content API is a public government API with no authentication requirements.
• sections and alert_status fields are JSON strings; parse them with JSON.parse() in your workflow.
• The entry_requirements_text field is particularly useful for visa/passport/vaccination data extraction.
• The full-corpus run (~226 countries) takes approximately 4 minutes at 1 req/sec.