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Comment by andyjsantamaria | Hacker News Reader

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.

Lastly, I don't recommend bucketing NZ under Australia :)

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Yes! There's a few cities I visit very often but I ONLY visit in the "off season." Everything is much cheaper, things don't sell out, I don't get bothered by stupid events I have no interest in, parking is free or reduced price, I don't have to sit in traffic, and crowds are non-existent. I'd rather avoid crowds than pretty much any other factor other than maybe price.

I thought the same thing. My biggest factor is cost of travel and whether its in season or out of season. Then I guess the site would turn into a travelocity or expedia.

http://offpeak.io the project my team has been working on aims to solve this exact problem. We help travelers avoid peak season, and peak dates that are often associated with large business conferences.

That's great! May I ask where you're getting your data?

The search is really frustrating. Everything I type is not there and then it shows me things that are very far away from what I typed. It may be better to show a list organized by region or show the closest location you do cover to the one that was typed in.

It seems to be missing all but the largest cities. My guess is that you are manually adding data which would mean higher quality at the cost of general usefulness.

I used an Instagram heatmap to find places to visit/look at during a holiday, I would guess if one adds a "time heatmap" one can see which weeks/months are quieter and which are busier.

I had a great trip with a group of friends to Iceland in mid-winter, which was a time that other people were reluctant to go. It definitely made certain travel activities harder or impossible, but we got to experience lots of great things and many prices were lower. We also saw the spectacular Reykjavík new year's fireworks.

But I'd also appreciate this site's advice is handy because weather in a distant place is so unfamiliar and can have such a big impact on a trip.

Another idea: maybe look through each category in the Köppen classification and figure out what weather factors in such a climate would most affect the quality of someone's visit. For example,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...

Then somehow highlight those particular factors for each place. (I don't really know how best to organize this information.)

> what are your factors for deciding the best time to visit?

I used almost exclusively weather data. My scoring process is linked to near the date ranges I provide, so hopefully that is clear.

I would love to make better use of the number of people visiting. I had a really hard time getting additional travel data for what times are busiest, but I did my best with Google data. I'd even be willing to pay for tourist data by week or month, but I don't believe it exists on the scale I'd need it. If I find it, though, I'll be sure to iterate!

> Lastly, I don't recommend bucketing NZ under Australia :)

Good call. I changed the heading to "Australia & Oceania"

I doubt there's a single dataset containing tourist occupation across the world, but you can probably find it city by city, although often only in the original language.

For example, there's a report on the rate of occupation of hotels per fortnight in Barcelona, but it's a PDF and it's not even in Spanish (Castellano), but in Catalan, the regional language: https://www.diba.cat/documents/74348/115651101/Informe+Flaix...

I wrote earlier that I used a website witb an Instagram heatmap to see places around me in a tourist destination that people took pics, if that website used time as another dimension (not just geo coordinates), it would be a rough approximation of the popularity of destinations per week/month.

Nice. It's true NZ is small but it's worth standing on its own.

Weather is important but it's not the only factor or the most important one for everyone. If there was "One tool to rule them all" for travel I think this could be really powerful. :)

"As of 6/22/2017 there are travel warnings for the United Kingdom; exercise a high degree of caution."

I thought this was an error at first, but the .ca travel advice is indeed to be extra careful visiting the UK.

Spain, meanwhile: "Exercise normal security precautions".

Huh.

I guess it's only as good as the data sources :)

Terrorist attacks are not earthquakes. Barring further evidence, there's no reason to believe Spain is any more dangerous today than it was two weeks ago. If anything, it's less, since there's one fewer group planning an attack.

Then again, I recently moved to Brussels and I'm planning an impromptu trip to Barcelona thanks to the falling flight prices, so maybe I'm just suicidal :)

You made my point better than me. Ppl go to Germany for Oktoberfest, too Vermont for foliage, to Utah for skiing - additionally, these could be reasons to not go to those places at those times.

Do you think NZ should be bucketed under Asia instead?

Australasia

Possibly Oceania.

Kiwiland is further from mainland Asia than pretty much anywhere else is, excluding the Americas. I'd go for Oceania, and throw Australia in there as well.

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