Touristic site attractiveness seen through Twitter

Tourism is becoming a significant contributor to medium and long range travels in an increasingly globalized world. Leisure traveling has an important impact on the local and global economy as well as on the environment. The study of touristic trips is thus raising a considerable interest. In this work, we apply a method to assess the attractiveness of 20 of the most popular touristic sites worldwide using geolocated tweets as a proxy for human mobility. We first rank the touristic sites based on the spatial distribution of the visitors’ place of residence. The Taj Mahal, the Pisa Tower and the Eiffel Tower appear consistently in the top 5 in these rankings. We then pass to a coarser scale and classify the travelers by country of residence. Touristic site’s visiting figures are then studied by country of residence showing that the Eiffel Tower, Times Square and the London Tower welcome the majority of the visitors of each country. Finally, we build a network linking sites whenever a user has been detected in more than one site. This allow us to unveil relations between touristic sites and find which ones are more tightly interconnected.Partial financial support has been received from the Spanish Ministry of Economy (MINECO) and FEDER (EU) under project INTENSE@COSYP (FIS2012-30634), and from the EU Commission through project INSIGHT. The work of ML has been funded under the PD/004/2013 project, from the Conselleria de Educación, Cultura y Universidades of the Government of the Balearic Islands and from the European Social Fund through the Balearic Islands ESF operational program for 2013-2017. JJR acknowledges funding from the Ramón y Cajal program of MINECO. BG was partially supported by the French ANR project HarMS-flu (ANR-12-MONU-0018).Peer Reviewe