VISUALIZATION​
MOST VISITED CITIES 2012
The geo chart below is showing the most visited cities for Interrail travelers in 2012. The size and colors of the dots indicates how much a city is visited. The larger the dot is and the sharper it is in color (towards the blue color) the more often the city has been visited. By clicking the dots you can see the name of the city and the number of visitors in the requested city.
From this visualization it is possible to see that those cities that are visited the most is Wien, Muenchen, Budapest Paris, Berlin and Zürich. For example in Wien the number of visitors is 13245 compared to Stockholm where the number of visitors is only 3870.
Another obvious showing in the geo chart is that it is more common to travel on Interrail in Central Europe and Southern Europe than in the Northern Europe. The reason for this could possibly be that people want good weather on their trip, since Interrails often take place in summer time. It could also be because the big cities and capitals which are the most popular are located closer to each other in Central Europe than in the Northern Europe. It might also be a factor that there are more rail connections in Central- and Southern Europe.
Below is another visualization of the same data also showing the most visited cities on Interrail trips in 2012. Here the data is represented as a word cloud.
For plotting the words in the map cloud the website 'Tagxedo' (www.tagxedo.com) has been used.
This cloud below contains European cities that people have been traveling through on Interrail. The greater the city name is on the map the more the city was visited in 2012. By clicking on a city name in the word cloud you will automatically be transferred to a Google site search on that specific city.
A little fun-fact, if it is not already noticed, the words are intentionally shaped like a map of Europe. However the city name and the geographic location does not match.
MOST VISITED COUNTRIES 2012
The regions map below visualizes the same data but here categorized in countries. It shows the most visited counties on Interrail trips in 2012. The sharper it is in color (towards dark green), the more often cities in this country have been visited.
It is easy to see that it is the countries in the Central and Southern Europe that are the most visited. The possible reasons for this are explained above.
NUMBER OF TIMES IN ROUTE VS. TRAVELERS CHOICE
Below a column chart is comparing the number of times a city has been in a route in 2012 and the number of times a city has been mentioned in a route on RailDude. This is called travelers’ choice. The traveler choice data is collected from the webpage RailDude where people poste their proposals to Interrail routes. It is not necessarily where they have actually travelled on Interrail (as the 2012 data represents).
There are some differences between these two datasets. For instance the number of proposals for different cities is larger compared to where the actual journeys were held. A reason for this can be that it is easier to suggest a lot of cities that are great to visit on an Interrail trip than what is actually realistic to achieve in a period of time. Sometimes when you travel you reach some cities where you want to stay for a longer period of time than first planned. If this happens it will compromise the total number of cities you will have time to visit.
On the contrary there are some cities where the 2012 data is larger than the travelers’ choice-data. It might be because this city is considered as an intermediate station-city, where you only stop for a short pit stop, for instance to change trains or something and therefore do not write it on that city in your route on RailDude. Because on the RailDude people often tend to mention the main cities they suggest, choose, or plan to visit, not all of the stops.