Anyone who enjoys looking at
maps as much as me and the geeky blogger over
at Geeky Traveller do, will have a field day checking out these maps found at WorldMapper. Don’t count on finding
your way around Durban, Montevideo, or Hollywood with this particular map. The map reflects international tourist trips
made in 2003 and territory size shows the proportion of world international tourist trips to that territory. WorldMapper
does the math by explaining it like so:
"In 2003 665 million international tourist trips were made.
Dividing this by the world population would mean 10.7% holidayed abroad. However some people make multiple trips, so
less than a tenth of the global population make tourist trips abroad…"
My math may not be that
hot, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on according to this map. The swelling above tiny
shriveled up Africa in red is mostly Western Europe which happens to be one of the world’s most popular destinations
for international tourists. Geeky Traveller makes a good point noting that the traveler
that likes to avoid tourists will find this map very useful.
There are several other maps like the one
above depicting Tourist Origins, Tourism Receipts, and Tourism Profit to name a few. See WorldMapper for the rest.