Most Touristy Countries

Surely it depends on where you are in the country as to how 'touristy' it feels. In Spain, for example, it feels very touristy at Madrid's Prado Museum or Barcelona's Sagrada Familia, but head to any village in Extremedura and it's very 'untouristy'.

I agree, I live in a touristy city (Edinburgh) and at certain times of the year the city population can almost double and within certain areas of the city then there can be 80% of the people there will be tourists and quite possibly more.I was in a pub /restaurant on the Royal Mile with some American friends a couple of weeks ago and reckon apart from me and the staff everyone else in there was a visitor.

The article is quite interesting. Thanks for posting. This author took the analysis quite seriously and does mention that seasonality and other variable will affect how touristy a place feels, but he /she is looking at the hard numbers. The author talks about running regression analysis for goodness sake!

Yes, part of the reason why I posted it was because of the deeper statistics driving the analysis. All too often we see lists of "Top 10 Somethings" that are just opinion while this was rooted in real statistical analysis. It's just another way to look at our world. I just wish that he would have published the full list of countries rather than only certain ones. I'd love to see where some of my favorites fall.

More useful I would have thought would be cities (or individual attractions/museums/etc) by visitor numbers.

yeah that's where I went wrong I forgot about the running regression analysis, I feel such a fool.

Something tells me that the reason the Netherlands ranks so high probably has nothing to do with it's windmills and tulips...

We see what you did there Tom. ;-)

When you think about how important tourists are to the economy of many of these countries, it is interesting to see a serious analysis and not one based on the length of the wait to get up the Eiffel Tower! Statistics can certainly be over done, but a lot of how "touristy" some place is relies on anecdote and often lacks context. Everyone told me how "touristy" Edinburgh was and that it's just loaded with "Tartan Tat." Now, I would be the last person to suggest that Edinburgh lacks tourist shops, but, it really isn't that hard to get away from the See You Jimmy Hats and Tartan toothbrushes. The only time I've seen true tourist hordes in Scotland is during the Festival in Edinburgh. When I've been out of Edinburgh in July, August and September I've seen other tourists, but hordes? I don't think so. So, what is touristy to me--the Wisconsin Dells--and what is touristy to a local in Inverness is probably on different scales.

So, while I agree it would be interesting to see if they could parse their stats to the city level, I still think that this was a good article and provides another way of looking at where you are thinking of visiting.

I scanned the story. It seems there are always ways to slice and dice data. I don't believe he factored in number of places to visit or times of year to visit - both can help thin out crowds.

As an example, Estonian visitors are almost all concentrated in Tallinn's old center, and primarily in the summer.

Denmark tourists generally end up in Copenhagen (or surrounding sights) and generally in the summer. As you get outside the tourist centers (and in Denmark's case, tourist season), the crowds thin quickly. That said, I was in Copenhagen in July/August and it didn't feel as touristy as Rome, Florence, Venice in October/November. Even though Italy has many more places to visit, the main places seem packed pretty much all year.

There are also places like Costa del Sol which are heavily populated with ex-patriots. I'm not sure if they count as tourists for his story, but they sure make that part of Spain feel touristy.

If that is true of the Netherlands, Tom, then we should start to see a huge influx of tourists here in Washington State.