Flickr Tourism Indicator 2011 by The Data Republic @thedatarepublic

BARCELONA

MADRID

FLICKR TOURISM INDICATOR 2011 BETA

BY COUNTRY:

BY MONTH:

BY DAY:

BY HOUR:

TOURISTS BY COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

TOURISTS BY MONTH

TOURISTS BY TOURIST ATTRACTION

Spain 22.01%
United Kingdom 11.72%
Italy 11.41%
United States 9.73%
France 6.89%
Germany 4.20%
Netherlands 4.16%
Brazil 2.87%
Canada 1.99%
Russian Federation 1.92%

Jan.

10%

Feb.

12%

Mar.

11%

Apr.

14%

May

15%

Jun.

14%

Jul.

12%

Aug.

11%

Sep.

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

Sagrada Família 20.29%
Park Güell 15.50%
Plaça Catalunya 12.63%
Rambla-Boqueria 10.71%
Barceloneta 10.15%
Santa Maria del Mar-Born 9.59%
Font Màgica-MNAC 9.45%
Port Vell-Aquàrium 8.89%
Catedral 8.43%
Casa Batlló 7.87%

TOURISTS BY DAY OF THE WEEK

TOURISTS BY HOUR

Monday 27.26%
Tuesday 26.52%
Wednesday 26.94%
Thursday 27.71%
Friday 31.25%
Saturday 35.30%
Sunday 33.87%

10h

11h

12h

13h

14h

15h

16h

17h

18h

19h

20h

21h

22h

23h

SAGRADA FAMILIA

PL. CATALUNYA

DID YOU KNOW?

50% of the tourists concentrates in the 7% of Barcelona’s surface area. Specifically, in the areas where the major tourist attractions are located: Sagrada Família, Park Güell, Plaça Catalunya, Las Ramblas, Macba, Born, Barceloneta, Port Vell, Port Olímpic, Font Màgica of Montjuïc and the Olympic Area.

The district of Ciutat Vella concentrates the 40% of the tourists, followed by the Eixample with a 30%. On the other hand, Nou Barris and Sant Andreu only attract the 0.1% and 0.5% of the overall tourists respectively.

The Sagrada Família is the Barcelona’s tourist attraction with a higher density of tourists per km2, with more than 6,700 tourists/km2, 56 times over the Barcelona’s average density, which is 119 tourists/km2. It is followed by the Barcelona’s Cathedral with 3,675 tourists/km2.

Brazilian, Canadian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish prefer mostly the Eixample above Ciutat Vella. Meanwhile, Belgian, German, Spanish, French, British, Italians and Americans prefer to move around Ciutat Vella. Swedes prefer the Eixample in 48% of cases, while the Germans prefer Ciutat Vella in 45% of cases.

The Spanish are the most numerous nationality in most tourist attractions of Barcelona, especially in the Parc de la Ciutadella and the Torre Agbar (over 40% of total), but with some exceptions, like the whole mountain of Montjuïc, where the British are the main nationality in the Olympic Ring, the Castle and the Magic Fountain, as in the Park Güell and the whole of the Rambla. Meanwhile, Americans are the first nationality in Casa Batlló, Hotel W, la Boqueria and La Pedrera.

By seasons, the Sagrada Família is the most visited tourist attraction throughout the year, followed by the Plaça Catalunya which is the second most visited in spring, summer and autumn, while the Park Güell ranks in second place in winter.

Despite what may seem, the areas closest to the beach as Barceloneta, the Port Olímpic or Port Vell have the lowest percentage of tourists during the summer months, the spring is the preferred season for tourists visitng Barceloneta and Port Vell and winter for the Port Olímpic.

American tourists are the ones that have a most significant presence during all hours of the day, even with percentages of 5% of total between 5 and 6 in the morning. Meanwhile, Spanish, French or Italian clearly decrease in number from 1 am and are concentrated mainly in the range between 11am and 5pm.

50% of Chinese tourists concentrate their stay in Barcelona during the months of January and February, when on average, these two months only attract 22% of all tourists in Barcelona. Meanwhile, 65% of Mexican tourists analyzed came during the month of May, which is preferred by the largest percentage of tourists.

42% of tourists from Hong Kong prefer to visit Barcelona on Wednesdays, 15 points above the average for that day among the other tourists of all nationalities. While most tourists prefer to visit the city on Saturdays (35%), just an 8% of Japanese, Canadians and Norwegians visit the city that day.

ABOUT THE INDICATOR

In our cities, especially in touristic cities such as Barcelona or Madrid, we constantly see tourists with their digital cameras, taking photos everywhere. Photos are now geotagged with latitude and longitude data and uploaded by users to social networks such as Flickr. Therefore, photos uploaded at Flickr become a very interesting way to build a new indicator that can show which cities in the world are the most popular among social network users or in the case of a certain city, which areas, neighborhoods or tourist attractions are the most visited by tourists.

With this indicator, we want to contribute to identify certain behavior patterns that might be interesting to evaluate the location of new businesses, to better target tourism services or just to improve the mobility and signalization of touristic spots. But this should be as well an interesting way to measure the impact of tourism over cities, not just over the economy but over their public spaces, on the quality of life of their neighborhoods and also their neighbors.

The Flickr Tourism Indicator by The Data Republic stands out as a new, quantitative, objective and smart way to compare the touristic performance and success of different cities, different city’s areas or different tourist attractions, as well as to measure the impact of tourism over cities. Smart tourism for smart cities.

ABOUT THE DATA

The Flickr Tourism Indicator 2011 is built on data extracted through the Flickr API, which allowed us to obtained more than 192,800 photos geotagged in Barcelona and 142,600 geotagged in Madrid, between January 1st 2011 and December 31st 2011. We have discarded those whose owner’s origin is unknown (not indicated in his/her Flickr profile) and those who reside in the areas of Barcelona and Madrid, in order to analyze just those photos taken by tourists. After that refining process we kept a little bit more than 47,800 photos in the case of Barcelona and 25,100 in the case of Madrid. However, with this indicator we wanted to analyze the behavior and occupation of the city by tourists, therefore we discarded to analyze photos but users behind this uploaded photos. Finally, we obtained that for Barcelona we had a sample of 2,858 tourists that took photos in Barcelona during 2011. In the case of Madrid, the figure was 1,962 tourists.

In order to analyze where tourists mostly concentrate and how they move, we used the census sections of Madrid and Barcelona, in order to calculate the number of tourists that were in that public space anytime during 2011. We calculated the density of tourists on each census section in absolute terms, but also in terms of tourists per km2 and tourists per 1,000 population of each section, thanks to data extracted from OpenData Bcn and the Statistics Institute of Madrid. Finally, we drew a total of 31 polygons for Madrid and 29 for Barcelona, those areas considered as the top tourist attractions in both cities to see specific behavior in these areas. We have used the Geonames’ API to normalize geographic data on countries of origin. We have also used CartoDB as our geospatial database for this project.

Given the specific nature of the sample, it is important to highlight that conclusions that can be drawn are conditional on the usual profile of a consumer who makes intense use of cloud services and web 2.0, ie there is a profile of tourists visiting Barcelona or Madrid that cannot be represented in this analysis. Therefore, this is a study that focuses exclusively on Internet users tourists, although it has to be said, they are becoming more numerous and therefore it is gradually a more relevant sample for the whole tourism industry in Barcelona or Madrid.

Statistics information:

Universe: tourists in Barcelona (7,450,000 estimated for 2011 according to Turisme de Barcelona) and tourists in Madrid (10,000,000 estimated for 2011 according to Turismo de la Comunidad de Madrid).
Sample: 2,858 Flickr accounts (tourists) for Barcelona and 1,962 for Madrid between January 1st 2011 and December 31st 2011.
Margin of error (with p=q=50% and a confidence interval of 95%): Barcelona: 1.8%; Madrid: 2.2%

Data sources: Flickr, OpenData BCN, Instituto de Estadística de la Comunidad de Madrid

NOTE: this sample is based on single unique users, whilst the universe shows total number of tourists. We have to take into account that for each pic uploaded there is usually more than one tourist behind.