Hacks pages

So far we have been posting a number of travel top10s on this blog. They are good top 10s, but they are never final. We work on them to improve them. So rather than posting a fixed top 10 our blog we decided to make dynamic overviews on hacks pages.

So far we have the following hacks page.

• Most romantic cities for travellers
• Most dangerous cities for travellers
• Most expensive cities for travellers
• Most culture cities for travellers
• Most walkable cities for travellers

You'll see that the top 5 for romantic cities is a bit different from the one posted on the blog. Better, we think...

The most romantic places: Venice, Kovalam and Santorini

In this week's hack we tried to find out how romantic a destination is for travelers. We compiled a list of destinations that are mentioned in online magazine top 10s as most romantic. Than we looked what data we had available in our database of these cities had a positive correlation with these cities. The assumption is that this data could be used to predict how romantic a given city is.

The mechanism was quite simple but proved very effective. Move the 'romantic' slide on www.triposo.com to the right and you get a top 5 of romantic places:

	Venice , Italy (Venezia in Italian) is still one of the most interesting and lovely places in the world. This sanctuary on a la...
	Kovalam is a beautiful beach in Kerala, India. Thirty years ago, Kovalam was a hippy idyll: a picture perfect tropical beach; a...
	Santorini is a volcanic island in the Cyclades group of the Greek islands. It is located between Ios and Anafi islands. It is famo...
	Florence (Italian: Firenze) is the capital of the region of Tuscany in Italy, with a population of some 366488. The city is consi...
	Manali is a city in the Kullu Valley. Manali, at the northern end of the Kullu Valley in Himachal Pradesh, is a hill station si...

It seems our mechanism has a bias towards the Indian subcontinent, or rather, Indians seem to like to describe their hill stations and beaches as romantic, a preference that finds its way into our database. I'm sure we can filter it out, but if the hack as a whole works well, who's to say that these Indian places aren't among the most romantic on the planet?

You can play with the slides and move the map around to get your own personal top 5 of romantic places. My list would be: Amalfi, Positano, Sorrento, Ravello and Naples.

New hacks, new interface!

So here it is: a new hacks and a new (and much improved) way of looking at the hacks. We've done a whopping six new hacks:

• popularity: which places are most popular?
  
• price level: what are cheap places, what are expensive places?
  
• safety: which places are relatively 
  
• romance: what are the most romantic destinations?
  
• culture: want to go to a museum? Here are your best bets!
  
• walkability: what places are best for a nice stroll

More importantly we have a new way of presenting the results of these hacks on www.triposo.com. You can use the slides to create any combination of th

e above 6 criteria and get the best results on the map. So if you want a place that is unsafe, yet romantic and dead cheap, we have a bunch of really romantic places in Afghanistan for you, like Bamian or Herat. If it's cheap and safe you want head for South-East Asia. Or you zoom into Southern Italy and look for the most romantic places (Amalfi!). It's great fun to play around with, we think.

The upcoming blog posts we'll shed some light the individual hacks. Meanwhile, we appreciate your feedback.

Map of the month

We're busy looking at different ways of determining what is a good time to visit a destination. One way is to look at how many photos in a destination are taken in a given month. The following world map shows what the results are:

 

At first glance the following conclusions can be drawn: the Southern hemisphere is popular December to February, the Northern hemisphere June to August. Not much of a surprise, but it is sort of proof that the mechanism works. Places like Mexico, China, Indonesia, Spain, India, Morocco and the Middle East have a profile that is more colorful with visitors in winter and in summer. 

With a bit more detail in the map, you could surely see some more interesting things. Bariloche lighting up in July, Amsterdam in April, that sort of thing. Enough reasons to continue working on this! We'll keep you updated.

London, New York, Berlin and the rest

So it's London, our christmas no. 1!

This weeks travel hack was to come up with a algorithm that ranks cities on how good they are for a mid winter trip.
Based on the algorithms we explained in the two previous posts (1,2) we have compiled a nice Christmas top 100.

So here it finally is, the christmas top 5.

1. London: The Brits invented christmas pudding and got away with it. With christmas lights all over town, shopping at Harrod's and a giant Christmas tree on Trafalgar square London deserves its first place.
2. New York: It's big and it's lit up like a huge Christmas tree - and is there any place that is better for Christmas shopping? We think not.
3. Berlin: the German capital combines traditional german Christmas markets with endless shopping, dining and nightlife possibilities.
4. Cologne: One of the best traditional Christmas markets in one of the prettiest german cities.
5. Nuremberg: the olderst Christmas market in the world makes Nuremberg one of the top places to go.

For the other 95 you can browse the map. If you want a few secret tips: Talinn, Strasbourg and Bratislava are off the beaten track, but they surely deserve their place in our top 100.

London tops most popular Christmas markets list

Yesterday we had the Christmas World map, that showed which regions had relatively many pictures taken around Christmas time. The second step in our Christmas Hack is an analysis showing which cities are often most often on webpages and blogposts about Christmas markets. A nice and clean way to measure the popularity of Christmas markets.

These are the results:

1. London

2. Berlin

3. Nuremberg

4. Cologne

5. Frankfurt

6. Munich

7. Dresden

8. Lincoln

9. Dublin

10. Bath

11. Vienna

12. Leeds

13. Birmingham

14. Manchester

15. Prague

16. Chicago

17. Strasbourg

18. Salzburg

19. Edinburgh

20. Bruges

21. Paris

22. Aachen

23. Rothenburg

24. New York

25. Brussels

26. Trier

27. Krakow

28. Copenhagen

29. Hamburg

30. Stuttgart

Germany has got the Christmas market market cornered. It seems to me that UK cities are slightly overrated in this result. I'd rate Nuremberg higher than London. My personal surprise was Lincoln - but I looked it up and Lincoln has the biggest christmas market in Europe. I just didn't know.

If we mix these results with yesterdays, correct for the above mentioned flaw and throw in some more things like alround popularity and we have a pretty good mechanism.

The map of Christmas

We're busy making a Christmas Travel hack. We're gathering data to find out which cities are best for a (pre) Christmas trip. One type of data we are analyzing is the number of photo's taken around christmas time. So while we were busy doing that, we had the idea to make a map that shows which percentage of all photo's taking in december in a given location are taken around christmas time. The following map shows the result:


On the map red means that a large percentage of december photos are taken around christmas. As you see, Europe lights up brightly, especially Central Europe - not strange given the popularity of Christmas markets in Germany, the Czech republic and Austria.
Although it's hard to judge by looking at a world map on this scale, you can also conclude from the data that cities are popular around christmas - more so than the countryside.
Mexico also seems quite a popular place around Christmas.

The real christmas hack will come soon - so check back soon to see whether the results of that hack match with this map.