Movements outside the country
To begin our journey around the world, we first display a simple plot of the most popular international tourist destinations. The figure below shows popular cities, and the size of each marker corresponds to the number of check-ins to that location.
We notice that the most popular cities are mostly metropoles or megalopoles in developed countries. They’re mostly big-name tourist cities that people first think of when picking a destination. Let’s take a closer look at some of them to see if we can observe some smaller-scale trends.
It is interesting to know where users check-in the most, compared to the local population of their destination city. We further inspect two cities – San Francisco, California and Paris, France to see if we can spot any tourist behavior. We superimpose the check-ins of local users (i.e. Americans) and international travelers.