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Relative Tourism


This is a ranking of how many tourists each of the cities in my CITIES list get each year, relative to their population.

Why? Because I’m curious if there is a correlation between places I like and the amount of tourism they get. And because I suspect you, like most people, would prefer to visit places with fewer tourists. So if you notice somewhere on this list has a very high number, it might be best to visit in shoulder season—and if it has a low number, you could visit whenever.

(I don’t think it’s ironic for tourists to prefer places without tourists. You can, for example, enjoy going to Disneyland and prefer that fewer people are there when you go. Those two preferences are not mutually-exclusive).

Green are cities I love, yellow are cities I like, and red are cities I do not like.

In general a score <4 is good to visit whenever. However, consider the score in the context of the city: some places, like Florianópolis, receive the vast majority their tourists during ~2 months of the year. Other places have more evenly spread out tourism.

Relative Tourism scores

v1: For cities 500k+ population

  1. Mexico City: 0.41
  2. Belo Horizonte: 2.03**
  3. Buenos Aires: 2.24
  4. Tbilisi: 2.33
  5. Madrid: 3.10
  6. Florianopolis: 4.92
  7. Barcelona: 5.57
  8. Vancouver: 11.85
  9. Lisbon: 11.9
  10. Paris: 18.5

v2: For all cities.

  1. Mexico City: 0.41
  2. Zurich: 0.5*
  3. Belo Horizonte: 2.03**
  4. Buenos Aires: 2.24
  5. Tbilisi: 2.33
  6. Madrid: 3.10
  7. Florianopolis: 4.92
  8. Geneva: 5.05*
  9. Bariloche: 5.55
  10. Barcelona: 5.57
  11. Split: 5.63
  12. Cádiz: 6.72
  13. Salamanca: 6.94
  14. Vancouver: 11.85
  15. Lisbon: 11.9
  16. Paris: 18.5
  17. El Chaltén: 92.19
  18. Grindelwald: 200+* 

*The data in Switzerland was strangely scarce and didn’t line up well the other tourism data I was using, so there’s a lot of guessing here. Take the Switzerland numbers with a grain of salt.

**There wasn’t much data for Belo Horizonte, since it’s not a popular tourist city. 

Takeaways

1: This is a flawed experiment—tourism feels different in Grindelwald than it feelsin a bigger city, like Lisbon.

2: For the 500k+ cities list, the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient for my enjoyment of a place and its relative tourism score is -0.44, with a p-value of about 0.21—this is a pretty terrible p-value. But, it suggests that I tend to prefer places with less tourism.

3: I visited these places during various times of the year. For example, I visited Lisbon during peak tourist season but Paris during the offseason. That likely influenced my opinions. If I visited all of these places during peak tourist season, I suspect the correlation would be stronger.

4: Still, this is a fun list and perhaps useful as you consider where and when to travel.

* * *

Methodology and notes:

1. I am using official numbers wherever I can find them (they are generally available to the public). If I can’t, I’m using the most authoritative-seeming unofficial number. This gets complex, because some numbers count overnight stays and day trips, and other count just overnight stays. Some places do not have any publicly official numbers. I’m doing my best, and noting where I am not confident in the data.

2. I am then dividing that number by the official, most recent population count in that city. I am not making any exception to this rule.

3. The number we get is the Relative Tourism score.