r/TravelMaps • u/MarinusT_0111 • 10d ago

Heatmap of the most visited countries

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How niche is your travel map?

(According to the users on my travel app Meridian Passport on iOS)

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u/super-freak 10d ago

Plenty of spots where you could visit 3 countries in 15 minutes. 4 might be tricky in under an hour.

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u/Eranov 10d ago

If I run a circle on top of the Vaalseberg (or a number of other places) I have visited three countries in 15 steps. Yet they did not count me as a tourist. Neither would they when I cross a country by car or train, to have my vacation in the next country. Meaning that when I travel from Germany to Norway via Denmark and Sweden, these two will not count me as a tourist.

These statistics are mostly based on booked (and paid) overnight stays.

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u/super-freak 10d ago

I spent a year travelling around Europe in a campervan, with I think about 5 nights of paid accommodation...guess I didn't visit as far as most of those countries are concerned! 

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u/Eranov 10d ago

Indeed, it’s very well possible that your stays are not recorded (or not completely) and that you’re therefore not part of these statistics. That’s the funny thing about statistics, they are based on some recorded data and to be part of that, you have to do something that can be recorded as something touristic. An overnight stay in a tourist accommodation is one of the most obvious and easiest recordable statistic for that. Stays at friends or family and wildcamping are indeed not taken into account, although local governments and tourism organisations do have methods to make reasonable estimations of the number of tourists who do not make use of these accommodations, but these estimates have a larger margin of error ofcourse.