Web Scraping Data on NYC-Toursim
The skills the author demoed here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.
Introduction
New York City is one of the most visited cities in the world, and tourism is one of the city's primary sources of revenue. As someone who has lived in New York City for more than 10 years, I thought it would be fascinating to do a quick data analysis to observe how tourism has changed over time. Let's get started...
Data - Scrapping data
TripAdvisor and NYCdata were used to scrape data. Tripadvisor is a fantastic resource for finding travel information, making it one of the most popular sites in this domain. The dataset I scraped has four columns: the name of the attraction, its type, the number of reviews it has got, as well as its rating. I was curious to learn which of the city's hundreds or thousands of attractions were the most popular. This dataset depicts the total popularity of each attraction place. Here's a sneak glance at the dataset:
The second site I scraped was New York City Data. It's a page containing data and information mostly for educational purposes, including data regarding New York City tourists during the last 13 years. The data I scraped includes data on the number of domestic and international tourists, the economic impact of tourism on New York, and the hotel industry performance of NYC.
Data Analysis
Second Dataset
After reviewing the first dataset's findings, I moved on to the second dataset. We're looking at the overall number of visitors, including foreign and domestic, under the Domestic and International Tourists section. Between the year 2004 and 2017, there were almost 710 million visits, as seen in the graphs below. Domestically, 569 million dollars were spent, while the rest was spent internationally. It's no secret that New York City is a popular tourist destination for both domestic and foreign travelers, and it's only becoming bigger.
The Economic Impact on NYC's Economy was the next category I examined into. It includes information on overall tourist expenditure, taxes, earnings for local workers, and employment created by tourism. Between 2004 and 2017, international and domestic visits generated over 32 billion dollars in annual revenue, 8 billion dollars in annual taxes, 18 billion dollars in annual earnings, and over 34,000 employment.
Furthermore, tourism benefits New Yorkers by providing more job opportunities and financial resources. The link between total visitor spending and wages is positive, implying that more people visiting NYC will help the city generate more job opportunities and revenue.
The performance of hotel business is the next category, and I investigated the following variables: daily room rate and average hotel occupancy. As one of the most popular tourist destinations, New York City's hotel market is one of the largest and most profitable. The daily room fee in NYC has always been above $200, while the occupancy rate has remained consistent above 0.8 or 80 percent on average, as shown in the first graph.
Conclusion
To summary, tourism is unquestionably one of the city's most valuable revenue streams. From 2004 to 2017, it helps the government generate about 18 billion in revenue each year, although the numbers dropped slightly during the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
Contact
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or GitHub.
Github: https://github.com/Evinwlin/NYC_Toursim
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wei-evin-lin/
