I wanted to build a tool to help people decide <i></i>when and where to travel<i></i>. As I started building, I realized that "when" and "where" need separate treatment to be most useful. The map tool handles "where" best:<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/travel-weather-map/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/travel-weather-map/</a><p>Clicking through each week would be frustrating for those who know where they want to travel but not when. For these people I built "best time to travel" pages using the same data.<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/best-time-to-travel/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/best-time-to-travel/</a><p>My hope is this site will help travelers plan.<p>This data is taken from the National and Atmospheric Administration's global summaries of the day (NOOA's GSoD). I used an SQL database to crunch the numbers into monthly and weekly averages by station. For the "best time" pages I used and calculated several more variables. I then imported the data into Tableau and added the filters you see on the map. I also used data from the State Department regarding travel advisories.<p>Would love your thoughts!<p>The whole buildout was a solo project, but I owe Ryan Whitacker a big "thank you" for his guidance. He built a similar tool on his site (<a href="https://decisiondata.org/the-best-time-to-visit-anywhere/" rel="nofollow">https://decisiondata.org/the-best-time-to-visit-anywhere/</a>) in April, and was generous to offer me guidance for expanding upon his idea.<p>Known issues:<p>* I am aware that the map is bad on mobile, so my next step is to improve the mobile experience.
This is super interesting idea and something I'd reference a lot. The big question I have is what are your factors for deciding the best time to visit? I'd argue setting up the context is really important because weather is a major factor but it isn't the only one. There are times of year that have cultural significance as well as annual events, etc. I like the safety advisory aspect and the population of travelers. It would be interesting to know what types of groups travel there and when. So for instance, I want to go to Hawaii but not there are going to be tons of kids and I'd like to do it cheaply and I don't care about the weather.<p>Lastly, I don't recommend bucketing NZ under Australia :)
It's a nice idea, for sure. I'm not sure I'd use it much since other considerations apart from weather also exist.<p>A few things I've noticed:<p>• The search could use some awareness about other names of locations. For example, München cannot be found, Munich can. Tübingen doesn't seem to exist at all (maybe too small).<p>• For people outside the US (yes, they exist) it'd also be nice to have a site-wide switch to metric. This then won't require you to have two charts of everything either (except snow coverage which doesn't seem to exist in metric).<p>• The legends for the charts look a lot like buttons, which can be a bit confusing at first. Maybe it's better to integrate the legend into the charts, e.g. maybe like <a href="http://hypftier.de/temp/2017-08-23_090140.png" rel="nofollow">http://hypftier.de/temp/2017-08-23_090140.png</a> – would also save a bit of space; whitespace currently looks a bit haphazardly applied in general.<p>• The animation of the charts seems a bit pointless, considering that they're all below the fold anyway.
This is really neat! Only thoughts: it assumes one's definition of 'best' is 'best weather' and that in turn means it matches with what your algorithm decides is most pleasurable (which I think it does a pretty good job at). This is probably ok for most people but e.g. I like to travel to see nature and rare species of plants and whatnot, and that completely changes what 'best' is for me as it makes weather not one of the top things to consider.
I was surprised with the cities shown on the map -- nothing from Britain or Ireland, only Odense from Scandinavia, yet five places in Moldova and loads more in Ukraine.<p>Looking at Copenhagen [1], the Celsius graph is maxing out at 10°C -- perhaps it would be neater to show a single graph, with a Fahrenheit scale on the left and Celsius on the right. Or just detect that my browser locale is <i>not</i> en_US, and show Celsius...<p>Minor thing: metres per second (m/s) is a fairly common wind measurement unit. And it should be km/h, not KPH.<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-copenhagen-dk/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-copenh...</a>
This is great - I think the search functionality could be improved a bit (a lot of results following the one I was looking for that didn't seem related, but the right one did show up first).<p>I wonder if there would be a benefit of a "community" element as well, as in allowing comments on the pages, to give locals the opportunity to chime in with their advice.
A tiny bit of feedback...<p>> June – August is slow/unreported season for tourism in Edinburgh, so lodging and other accommodations may cost as much as usual.<p>This is... odd. In August, Edinburgh has the legendary (Fringe) Festival, a month in which the cities population quadruples, making it easily the most intense month of the year for tourism.<p>Maybe the dataset requires some manual tweaking?
On the 'Weather in Sydney' page:
"The warmest time of year is generally mid-January where highs are regularly around 61.9°F (16.6°C) with temperatures rarely dropping below 50.3°F (10.2°C) at night"<p>I think something is off here. That sounds like our winter weather! I would guess our average summer temp would be closer to 30deg C
Weather is just one small piece of people's thought process when planning a vacation. But this tool is clearly all about weather... Perhaps finding a new way to describe it other than "the best time to visit" would avoid people coming down on the tool because they want to talk about more than the weather.
I love your weather summaries. Your formula nails it with this one: <a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-san-diego-ca-us/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-san-di...</a><p>Most weather summaries seem to miss that early/mid-September is significantly hotter than the traditionally hot months of July and August for most locations.<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-louisville-ky-us/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-louisv...</a>
> When can you find snow in Louisville? Weather stations report a bit of annual snow likely to be deepest around March, especially close to early March. Powder (new snow) is most often falls around November 12th.<p>Seeing powder forecasts for Louisville, KY cracked me up.
This seems really off:<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-portland-or-us/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-portla...</a><p>It's says the daily highs in the summer are low 60s and that the driest months are in the middle of the winter.
Best time of year is subjective!! All Lonely Planet guide books solve this problems by explaining what each place is like at each time.<p>Eg, for Yosemite, it describes how during summer it is rediculosy busy & hot, so you might prefer to go during the shoulder months, but then you risk having some of the park closed for snow. So, "best weather is subjective".<p>Likewise, there are many locations, such as Thailand, where the best time to travel is winter. It's too hot in the summer!!
Hey, this is really useful! I'll bookmark it and probably use it.<p>A few bugs/glitches, though:<p>- The Celsius temperature graph for Barcelona ( <a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-barcelona-es/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-barcel...</a> ) doesn't show temperatures above 25ºC, so every temperature above that gets cropped to 25. The scale should probably be adapted to the data.<p>- "The busiest month for tourism in Barcelona, Spain is May, followed by March and March." March and March?<p>- Maybe this is a problem with your dataset and not the app, but just in case, check the snow graph/data for A Coruña: <a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-a-coruna-es/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-a-coru...</a> - 108 cm of snow in April? I can guarantee the real average is close to zero :)<p>- Also in little known tourist destinations (e.g. A Coruña, from the last link) tourism in all seasons is reported as "slow or unreported". Which is true, of course (in the best month in A Coruña you will see much fewer tourists than in a really bad month in Barcelona). But maybe relative data (tourism related to the average in that city) could make sense?<p>Keep up the good work!
Really neat application of the data. I'm the Director of Marketing at a mid-sized destination marketing organization (DMO) represented on your map (Aurora, Illinois -- we're actually a <i>terrific</i> place to visit in winter!). Curious to learn more about the variables used to deploy the "best time" pages and get a sense for where you'd like to take this further.
Recommendation: Travel for snow related trips (snowboarding/skiing) would largely depend on average snowpack on a mountain at that time of year, which is directly related to the amount of snowfall in that location as well as the temperature (does it get cold enough for artificial snow making). Build the right tool for planning snow trips and it should be easy to monetize.
This is a really interesting idea - the kind of tool that you only realize that you've been waiting for when someone shows you it! As someone who likes to travel quite a bit, this will replace a lot of Google searches for me potentially. Your weather summaries will also be great for SEO and are very well optimised.<p>One bit of feedback I'd give is it'd be worth populating with some "temperate" defaults (i.e. normal average temperature, normal humidity etc.). At the moment it seems like it might take a bit of configuring to get to the information you'd want, when it'd seem like you could take an educated guess.<p>UI/UX wise I would also make the "date" slider a bit more prominent and maybe have it simply limited to monthly averages (doesn't seem to matter <i>too</i> much if we're talking 2nd or 3rd week of March) for instance.<p>Otherwise, really love it, and excited to see the ways people are using Tableau for this kind of thing :)
The 'when to travel' could be made dependend on where you live. When I lived in Norway I thought 25C is quite warm. Now that I live in south Germany I think 25C is more intermediate. Also in Spring, temperatures feel a lot higher (since I got used to cold winter weather) then by the end of summer (when I got used to hot weather).
So the best time to visit Sydney is almost the entire year, except for the last 2 weeks of January?<p>> February 5th to January 14th<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-sydney-au/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-sydney...</a><p>Love the idea.
Many of the temperature charts have an uptick at the extreme right (end of December), and then (if you imagine them wrapping around to January) have a non-continuous drop at the start of January. I think there's something slightly funky there.<p>I saw at least one celsius chart where the data overflowed the maximum (20C) and the plot mashed against the top of the frame.<p>You could avoid having to double render the same data (and wasting space) by putting celsius on the right y axis of the farenheit chart.<p>Once you fix the bugs, pay a UI designer to give all of the pages a refresh. Work some SEO, and see if you can find a way to give search engine bots all of the various city pages (which I assume you dynamically generate). Throw in some hotel/airline-ticket site affiliate links and you should get a nice stream of income from this.
Pretty cool job.<p>It would be nice if the user had a few sliders to toggle (heat, humidity, rain, and crowds), rated say 0 to 10 (with 5 meaning don't care), to get around having to select an ideal temperature for everyone. Some people want sun, others want snow, and others don't care about either.
Nice website, as I had always been looking for such travel website like this.<p>On the travel-weather-map site, I searched for "San Francisco" and the first result was Argentina, and second was Costa Rica. I hope that the result is based on popularity and not based on alphabetical order.
> Tourism graph is based on Google searches for services used by tourists relative to the rest of the year.<p>That's a pretty clever way to go about it. I hope/suppose that the sampling bias isn't correlated with time-of-year somehow.
Great site, the UI/design isn't the best though. Improving that will make a huge difference. One of the first things I would do is to make Fahrenheit/Celcius a sitewide setting, like on WeatherSpark.com
This is a great idea, and something I always wished existed - kudos! Seems like there's some great opportunities for SEO and advertising here as well - keep rocking!
I don't know if that Tableau map is going to scale to your desired traffic levels. It's a great enterprise tool, and yeah there are a few publications that leverage it, but my instincts tell me to avoid it on a mid-to-high traffic public page. I could be wrong. It's a difficult graph to replicate under fire, but not so hard that a day or two spent on it wouldn't produce a more performant version.
Very interesting to start. I know for a fact that if you travel to Seattle in Jan/Feb it's really cheap, but of course that's because it will be raining a lot. Rain, for some people is not a real problem, but price is. With that in mind it would be cool to find out when is the best time to travel somewhere the cheapest. That would be really useful for me and probably others.
Cool!
I've built similar tool somewhere around 2011. I travel a lot and wanted to have a tool that would help me plan my travels according to specific months. I use it on regular basis since then and it's publicly available at:
<a href="http://weatherhopper.com" rel="nofollow">http://weatherhopper.com</a>
Something fishy is going on here:<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-cuba/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-cuba/</a><p><a href="https://imgur.com/YlM3zda.png" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/YlM3zda.png</a><p>But really great idea!
Immediately after pageload (without interaction), I get the following on Chrome 64 bit (60.0.3112) on Ubuntu 16.10:<p><i>An unexpected error occurred. If you continue to receive this error please contact your Tableau Server Administrator.<p>Session ID: 7EBED2C1927841ED9575329CE40EB6F7-0:0<p>Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'refreshImages' of null</i>
Cool idea! I just got back from Austria and was surprised about the rain. Didn't even think to pack a rain coat. Even though I checked the weather beforehand, I figured it was a minor fluke. So hard for a West Coast US person to understand that it rains some places in the summer.
Nice one! Just a thought, apart from atmospheric information; you can add Festival into account. Ex. Let's say Holi in India occurs during March, Kite Festival occurs during January. You can add such thing by just combining few places with Wiki Festivals!
Following the feedback from others, a few things seem odd (for Peru):<p>- I tried it with Lima-Peru and it actually suggested a bad time to visit the city: <a href="https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-lima-pe/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-lima-p...</a> . The weather on winter is quite humid ( <a href="http://www.generaccion.com/noticia/imagenes/grandes/188862-22_06_2013_12_30_36_1421985682.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.generaccion.com/noticia/imagenes/grandes/188862-2...</a> )so its not the best time to be there, compared to the summer.
- Also, on the mountains the season to avoid is the rain season, because it <i>really</i> rains (jan-feb).
- Finally, as others pointed, the choice of locations is a bit odd. There are a few smaller towns but for instance Cuzco or Macchu Picchu are not there
I like this idea a lot, but there is also on thing to consider, Crowds. The best weather also draws the biggest crowds. This drives up food and hotel prices. If you could somehow factor in the crowds and peak season, you could have a really useful tool.
I'm stoked you built this, as I've had the idea and desired the platform for a while. I do a ton of last minute travel and have semi-unlimited options so it's hard to filter down to the best options that offer what I'm looking for.
I bet you could do this by looking at all the Yelp reviews for an area over time. Some combination of average review score and total review quantity would produce a legit metric.<p>But Yelp and Google's APIs aren't really designed for this kind of use sadly.
Cool I had a similar idea a month ago when looking for a place to go camping.
To find the best weather forecast in a range of $x hours drive.
Or the best Weather forecast near direct connected airports from my towns airport.
The data can essentially be reduced to a single list on one page because the only thing that is really useful is the range of dates for the best time to travel for each location.<p>Better yet, add the option to sort the list by dates.
I would love a feature of this where it supports ranges of weeks or for the whole year. I want to use it to find the best place to <i>live</i> based on my preference of yearly weather!
Its funny, it got Vancouver, BC exactly opposite. I'm sure most resident of the notoriously wet city believe July 1-Aug 27 is the best time to visit and not Aug 27-Jul 1
Maybe we can partner up :). I made <a href="http://www.averageweather.io" rel="nofollow">http://www.averageweather.io</a> for a very similar reason.
Great work! Although it says the best time to visit San Diego is February through November. I guess that's right though; it's great here any time!