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.

While the local population spreads into the suburbs and the more residential parts of the city, the tourists tend to be more concentrated around the city-center (and the airport in the case of Paris), where most tourist attractions are located. So, if you plan on visiting San Francisco or Paris and you want to avoid those silly tourists, stay away from the center!

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We’ve almost come to the end of our journey, and it’s a good thing, because we were running out of pages in our passports to stamp! We want to see what the most popular countries to visit are. One thing we quickly realized though is that our dataset—unlike international football—is dominated by the US. With our dataset being so biased, we show below a map of which countries Americans tend to travel to. We show this data during each month of the year and try to observe patterns.

A few things to note:

• The most popular countries for Americans in almost every month of the year are Canada, Great Britain and Australia. These countries are the most heavily visited because Americans have an interest in learning the local languages in all of these places (or not).
• In general, countries tend to host more American tourists during warmer months of the year. This trend is especially prevalent in Europe, with countries like France, Spain and Italy welcoming relatively few tourists during winter, spring and fall but a high influx during summer.
• The number of visits to Germany remains high in the fall.
• Countries in the tropics and the southern hemisphere, namely Brazil and Argentina receive higher numbers of American visitors during the northern winter, as it’s warmer in those countries during this period.
• Mexico appears to be the only country to receive its highest number of visitors from the US during the month of March, coinciding with the annual storming of its beaches by unruly American university students on spring break.

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This is good-bye

Today we’ve learned a lot. Namely, we’ve learned that tourists tend to travel directly to the centers of cities, while locals are more evenly distributed. Furthermore, travel within a country is highly dependent on the geography of those countries. If a country has a lot of beaches, like France, then those beaches will be filled with tourists during the summer. During the winter however, those same tourists may opt for other, more mountainous terrains and hit the slopes. More important than any of this information though are the friends we’ve made along the way. Thanks for flying ADAirlines, we hope to see you again soon.