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.