Tourism Flows: a definitive visualisation

This article describes an online tool that I created. You can follow this link to interact with it.

Recently, I was asked to research online to which countries do russian tourists travel to. In order to answer this question, I visited several sites and quickly found out that most of the readily available statistics are aggregated totals (i.e. a list of countries reporting the total arrivals by year) and very few included the breakdown detailing the country of origin. I needed a more extensive dataset containing both country of origin and arrival. Ideally, a matrix showing all the tourist flows between countries, like this:

The official body that keeps and records all the statistic related to tourism is the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). They didn’t have exactly what I was looking for, but they did publish the “Outbound tourism” (trips abroad by resident visitors to countries of destination) figures for each individual country. The data is not perfect and not all countries report data at this level or for all years. However, I found out that is a great starting point to detect major trends.

With some data wrangling scripts, I managed to produce the table I was looking for and, since then, I have created a tool to accurately and easily visualize where do tourist go and come from. This is a screenshot of my tool:

I wanted the user to be able to see in one unified place both flows (inbound ad outbound) and I wanted the user to be able to have a historical view in order to track changes over time. So I designed a clean interface with just three options: country of interest, type of flow and year. With this design people can answer the business questions that I originally confronted:

1. Where do tourists of X nationality travel to?
2. Which origins do the tourist visiting X country come from?

For example, if I selected Australia — Outbound, I will see that Australians love to travel to Europe, particularly to Italy. If I selected Inbound, I would learn that the visiting public to Australia is much more diverse:

I encorauge you to play with the tool (link at the beginnig of the article) and select your own country to see what can you learn today! If you are iterested in the topic, the UNWTO also keeps three dashborads of different indicators related to tourism that go beyond the flows of tourists.

If you want to connect and have a conversation about this or any other topic, please feel free to find me on LinkedIn:

Juan Felipe Alvarez - Senior Data Analyst - Moët Hennessy | LinkedIn