Monday, March 04, 2019

The Over-Tourism Map


The Disneyfication Map visualizes the number of tourists visiting the countries of the world, in proportion to the local population. The map is an attempt to show where over-tourism could be having a negative impact on the local population and the visited areas.

The map uses data from the World Bank to show which countries have the most tourists in comparison to each country's population. The redder countries have more tourists and the greener countries have less tourists per capita. If you are more interested in the total number of tourists visiting each country (not the per capita figures) then you can view the data on the World Bank map of International Tourism. This World Bank map colors the countries of the world based on the total number of visiting tourists in one year.

The tourists per capita figure is based on the number of tourists who visited the country over the course of twelve months. Therefore Iceland's 6.52 tourist / resident figure doesn't mean that every out of every 7 people in Iceland 6.52 are tourists. It just means that the 2,225,000 tourists who visited Iceland in 2017 is a significantly higher number than Iceland's population of 338,349. Obviously those 2,225,000 tourists didn't all vacation in Iceland during the same week.

As well as showing in red the countries where over-tourism might be a problem the Disneyfication map also highlights cities which might be suffering from excessive numbers of visiting tourists. If you click on a city with a red dot you can view the estimated number of tourists per resident in the selected city.

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