Tourist Heat Map

This is what you would call a real map of the world’s tourist hot spots.

If your looking for an out of the way location for your next overseas trip, then stay well clear of the area’s marked in yellow, red and blue on this map. The map is the work of Bluemoon Interactive and is based on the quantity of geo-coded photo’s uploaded to the Panoramio  service from any one particular area.



The UN World Tourism Organization’s  rankings for 2009 state the following:

1.  France
2.  United States
3.  Spain
4.  China
5.  Italy
6.  United Kingdom
7.  Turkey
8.  Germany
9.  Malaysia
10. Mexico

I suppose you can make your own assumption on wether or not the map indicates these figures, or solely indicates the popularity of Panoramio in any particular area. It seems fairly acurate from first glance.

Below is a link to the full overlay in Google Maps.

http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=http://www.bluemoon.ee/~ahti/touristiness-map/touristiness-map.xml