74,762 Things To Do in America

There are 74,762 things to do in America. That is according to Tripadvisor - which currently has 74,762 different venues that have been rated and reviewed by its users.

In Travel Like a Local The Pudding has analyzed the reviews posted by Tripadvisor users to see if there is any difference in the type of places liked by tourists and those liked by locals. To do this they separated all the reviews into 'tourists' and 'locals' (locals being defined as those living within a 30 mile radius of a venue and tourists as those living more than 30 miles from the venue reviewed).

It turns out that there is a huge difference between the sorts of places liked by tourists and those liked by locals. For example in New York locations such as the Statute of Liberty, Central Park and the Empire State Building are very popular with tourists. However locals seem to prefer venues such as the Noguchi Museum and Domino Park, which are mostly ignored by tourists.

Using The Pudding's interactive map you can zoom in on any town or city in the United States to discover which venues are most popular with tourists and which are favored by locals. You can obviously also use the map to quickly find places of interest to visit across the country. There are 74,762 of them.



Back in 2013 Eric Fischer made a similar (but global) map of places visited by locals and tourists. His Locals & Tourists map highlights areas of cities popular with locals and places where tourists visit. To determine who are locals and who are tourists Fischer used Twitter data.

The Locals & Tourists map shows the locations of Tweets sent by locals (those who post in one city for one consecutive month) and tourists (whose tweets are usually centered in another city). The map provides a fascinating insight into locations that are popular with tourists and those which seem to be frequented mostly by locals. For example, in the screenshot above (of my neighborhood in London) you can clearly make out the London Olympics stadium - a local venue which is much visited by tourists.



Before creating his Twitter map of Locals and Tourists Eric Fischer had created a series of Locals and Tourists maps made by Flickr users.

The Locals and Tourists - Flickr maps used a similar methodology as that used in the Twitter map. On the Flickr maps blue points show where pictures were taken by locals and red points show where photos were taken by tourists. The locals were determined by identifying the people who had taken pictures in a city over a period of one month or more. Tourists were defined as people who had taken pictures mainly in another city and who posted pictures to Flickr in the mapped city for less than a month.