1,767,726 people have visited Iceland through Keflavik Airport in 2016. These statistics from the Icelandic Tourism Board (Ferðamálastofa) confirm that there has been an exponential growth in tourism to the country. Six years ago, when this latest growth really started after the infamous Eyjafjallajökull eruption. It looks as if this incident triggered a new wave of tourism, Inspired by Eruptions?, further fueled by new flights not only from established European mostly low cost carriers but also from the new Icelandic carrier Wow air founded in 2011. Globally successful movies and TV series further helped putting Iceland on the map of the global tourism industry.
Tag Archives: tourism
Air Spaces: Where the Planes Fly
The Future of Mapping was the theme of a Cartographic Summit jointly held by the International Cartographic Association (ICA) and Esri at Esri’s headquarters in Redlands (California). The aim of the event was to examine new directions in mapping in a time at which mapping is evolving at a rapid pace, enabling us to communicate in new ways, analyze important issues, and understand our world. Among the keynote speakers was graphics designer Nigel Holmes whom I had a chance to work with several years ago while making some contributions for Lonely Planet’s travel-infographics book How to land a jumbo jet. Meeting him in person at last reminded me to put online the last of the four cartograms that I made for the book.
The following map is a gridded cartogram visualisation of global flight tracks taken from the OpenFlights database. The map distorts the land area by the number of flights that pass a certain space which leads to these ‘ploughing patterns’ over some areas where are airplanes basically just passing by, such as in the western part of Australia where planes simply fly over on their way to the most populated southeast of the country. The colours in the map relate to the Worldmapper colour scheme (explained here).
Planet Holiday: The World’s Major Tourist Destinations
Tourist season is in full swing, especially in the wealthy parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Recent figures released by UNWTO World Tourism Barometer state that “international tourist arrivals reached 1,138 million in 2014, a 4.7% increase over the previous year.”
I mapped the grographical patterns of global tourism for the book ‘How to Land a Jumbo Jet‘ published by Lonely Planet. The following cartogram shows the countries of the world resized according to international tourist arrivals with the top 10 destinations also labelled (and listed on the bottom right corner), coloured in Worldmapper-style colours:
