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 44.60%
United States 10.04%
Italy 8.51%
United Kingdom 6.83%
Brazil 3.26%
France 3.11%
Germany 2.40%
Netherlands 2.04%
Portugal 1.68%
Argentina 1.48%

Jan.

12%

Feb.

13%

Mar.

13%

Apr.

14%

May

16%

Jun.

13%

Jul.

12%

Aug.

11%

Sep.

10%

Oct.

10%

Nov.

Dec.

Puerta del Sol 15.60%
Parque de El Retiro 15.39%
Plaza Mayor 10.04%
Cibeles 7.90%
Gran Vía (Alcalá-Telefónica) 7.39%
Pl. de Oriente-Teatro Real 6.47%
Palacio Real 6.12%
Museo del Prado 5.86%
Real Jardín Botánico 5.25%
Templo de Debod 5.10%

TOURISTS BY DAY OF THE WEEK

TOURISTS BY HOUR

Monday 25.64%
Tuesday 21.97%
Wednesday 23.96%
Thursday 26.15%
Friday 28.29%
Saturday 34.81%
Sunday 33.49%

10h

11h

12h

13h

14h

15h

16h

17h

18h

19h

20h

21h

22h

23h

GRAN VIA

PUERTA DEL SOL

DID YOU KNOW?

50% of the tourists concentrates in the 3.5% of the Madrid’s surface area. Specifically, in the areas where the major tourist attractions are located: Puerta del Sol, Plaza Mayor, Gran Vía, Cibeles, Park of El Retiro, Palacio Real, Almudena, Plaza de Oriente, Plaza de España, Museum of El Prado, Museum Reina Sofía, Puerta de Alcalá, Preciados St. and Casa de Campo.

The district of Centro (Downtown) concentrates the 57% of the overall tourists, far behind we find Retiro district with only 8% and Moncloa-Aravaca with 7%. On the other hand, Moratalaz with only a 0.1% and Villaverde and Vicálvaro with 0.2% appear as the Madrid’s districts that attract a lower number of tourists.

Plaza Mayor is the Madrid’s tourist attraction with a higher density of tourists per km2, with a total of 6,200 tourists/km2, 150 times overs the Madrid’s average density, which is 42 tourists/km2. It is followed by Puerta del Sol with 5,100 tourists/km2.

By districts, the Spanish, with 48% of cases, is the nationality less concentrated in the district of Centro, meanwhile 72% of French tourists are concentrated in this district, and 68% of Americans and 66% of Italians. Spaniards are the majority in all districts except Usera, where the French are the most numerous tourists.

Spanish represent the most numerous nationality in the vast majority of the tourist attractions of Madrid, in some cases virtually the only nationality, for example in the Towers of the former Real Madrid’s practice fields (85% of total) or Calle Goya (76% of all tourists). Only Americans get to be the majority nationality over the Spanish, particularly in the Almudena Cathedral and in the Palacio Real, with 27% and 30% respectively.

By seasons, the Retiro Park is the most visited tourist attraction in winter and summer, while the Puerta del Sol stands out clearly in spring and autumn. The Plaza Mayor gets a higher number of visitors in winter, while the Cibeles attracts more tourists in summer, but with a fairly homogeneous level throughout the year.

The shopping streets of Madrid also experience some seasonality in regard to the presence of tourists. Serrano and Goya streets concentrated to 45% and 41% of total annual tourists respectively just in summer. For its part, Preciados street attracts 45% of total tourists during the spring, while in the case of Fuencarral, 43% of tourists visit it in the fall.

American tourists are the ones that have a most significant presence during all hours of the day, even to levels of more than 4% of total between 3 and 5 am. For its part, the Spanish and Italians have higher concentrations between 6 and 7 pm, and the French and British prefer noon.

The month of July is one of the busiest months for tourists in general, but not for the British, who attended a greater percentage than in any other month of the year during the summer months (13.5% of the annual total). For their part, Mexican tourists are concentrated almost exclusively during the months of May through October, with almost imperceptible presence during the remaining months of the year. Americans are the ones with a lower seasonal component, they keep a very constant flow throughout the year, even over the Spanish.

Saturday is the preferred day to visit Madrid for the Spanish, Germans, Italians and Americans, while French and British happen to prefer Sundays. Outside of the weekend, Mexicans and Brazilians have a higher percentage of mobility arounds the city during the Wednesdays.

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.