Juan Convers

Eurostat provides an interesting dataset about how EU residents travel, including where people go, how much they spend and how long they stay. The 2023 data show how Europeans travel choices reflect how still the majority of foreign trips are carried out inside the union.

In 2023, Europeans made over 1.1 billion trips, spending 5.7 billion nights and €555 billion. Nearly three-quarters of these trips (73%) were domestic, though foreign travel accounted for a larger share of nights and expenditure.

Italy and Spain emerged as the top foreign destinations, while France also drew significant numbers of visitors from within the EU. Beyond the Union, the United Kingdom, Türkiye, and Switzerland were the most popular spots, with intercontinental destinations making up just 12% of foreign trips.

Overall, the data show a strong preference for familiar, nearby locations, balanced by the pull of longer journeys that contribute more heavily to tourism spending. You can read more about it here

Eurostats offers an interesting dataset about air travel in the continent, including the number of passengers per country. As you observe in the previous chart, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, had the highest number of air travelers through their airports in 2017.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago I have been working on this project to migrate my breaksian travel blog to the node platform where I'm running my applications. I already finished the main blog, but there are a couple of pieces more pending. Today I finished one of them. It was a small map showing the itinerary I followed while I was travelling in Asia and Oceania. I also took the opportunity to updated it with the missing data points.

My old LAMP hosting is about to expire and I’m using that account only to host a travel blog of my career break two years ago called breaksian. This weekend I migrated the contents to a node platform and I took the opportunity to review and publish a post about a week I spend in Ko Lanta, Thailand. Quite an special place.

Graph with the busiest airports in Europe based on the passenger totals. Data from: Air Passenger Transport Statistics

Today an Irish friend at work shared a very interesting news article describing how the German passport was the most convenient one to travel around the world. There is a visa restriction index that classifies the passports based to the number of countries and territories that a holder can visit visa free. Germany has indeed the highest score followed close by many other European countries. Here is a map of this index worldwide: