Planning a trip

On my last post I talked about Google Maps... Today I'm going to share a couple of holiday itineraries that I've put together using Google Maps:

London 2015
Vienna-Prague-Berlin 2016
Portugal & Spain 2018

This is the process that I've followed for planning these schedules:

• Research (browse the web, read guides, listen to podcasts).
• Enlist the interesting places you want to visit.
• Place the points in a map.
• Group the places into areas that are close to each other.
• Consider opening times and special events (exhibitions, concerts, festivals, etc). 
• Investigate restaurants and bars (check reviews on Foursquare and Trip Advisor).
• Choose an area for your hotel (the maps in Airbnb and Trip Advisor are very useful to make sure your selection is easily accessible and not too far from where you want to be).
• Take everything into account and plan your days.

I enjoy traveling well prepared to make the most of my time and to know a little about the places I visit. Sometimes you definitely need to improvise and sorprises can be great, but I've always found much truth in this phrase: "if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail".

Google Maps for traveling

I love Google Maps and I've used them to create my own collection of interesting places when visiting a city or planning a trip:

• Bangkok (2013)
• Montreal (2014)
• London (2015)
• Grece-Turkey (2015)
• Vienna-Prague-Berlin (2016)

I have also found them useful for explaining a route and defining guiding points on a map. This is an example I built to present a recommended itinerary from Mexico City to Acapulco (originally posted in my wedding blog):

O-D Animation

I just found a cool feature to animate dashboards!

It is possible to define a filter on a slide that then lets you explore the data as some kind of evolution. This works pretty neatly when observing a variable through time.

Remember the Ecobici dashboard? Check how this kind of animation can be applied on that data:

On Tableau Desktop you can automate the transitions and just hit the play button when examining your data, but this functionality doesn't work when you publish your file to the web. Anyways, the visualization looks something like this when it is automated: