Why does Rome2Rio use hotspot maps to divide expansion areas?

Like many other companies, travel search engine Rome2Rio has identified new areas of business development.

Professor Tanel Tammet from Tallinn University of Technology is a computer scientist who developed SightsMap, a tool that can map tourist attractions around the world based on Google Maps by locating images.

On the heat map, dark colors indicate an area with few images, red indicates a large number of images, and yellow means the area has a large number of geotagged images.

By clicking on a popular attraction on the heat map, users can see the location and street view images of the place, information from Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and Foursquare, and related articles on Google+.

Tammet launched SightsMap in February 2012. Since then, the tool has added many new features, such as itinerary planning.

Rome2Rio did a pretty interesting integration of SightsMap, and found that the distribution of scenic spot images is correlated with the coverage of transportation routes by train, bus and ferry.

The company said on its blog:

"This is not surprising, as places with better transport infrastructure are also places people are more likely to visit and take photos. We are also focusing on increasing the coverage of transport maps in tourist destinations."

Rome2Rio overlays its own traffic route maps on top of the SightsMap hotspot maps to identify areas that have rich image resources but lack Rome2Rio traffic route information.

The following figure is the final heat map after integrating the two maps:

Through the final heat map, Rome2Rio found that Cuba, Puerto Rico, Iceland, Jamaica, the Black Sea coast, northern Pakistan, Taiwan, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, northern Algeria and northern Tunisia are areas where it needs to increase its traffic map coverage.

(Compiled by Sylvia)

via: traveldaily