from Hacker News

Show HN: The best time to visit any city

by ignostic on 8/22/17, 5:24 PM with 118 comments

• by andyjsantamaria on 8/22/17, 6:27 PM

  This is super interesting idea and something I'd reference a lot. The big question I have is what are your factors for deciding the best time to visit? I'd argue setting up the context is really important because weather is a major factor but it isn't the only one. There are times of year that have cultural significance as well as annual events, etc. I like the safety advisory aspect and the population of travelers. It would be interesting to know what types of groups travel there and when. So for instance, I want to go to Hawaii but not there are going to be tons of kids and I'd like to do it cheaply and I don't care about the weather.

  Lastly, I don't recommend bucketing NZ under Australia :)

• by ygra on 8/23/17, 7:04 AM

  It's a nice idea, for sure. I'm not sure I'd use it much since other considerations apart from weather also exist.

  A few things I've noticed:

  • The search could use some awareness about other names of locations. For example, München cannot be found, Munich can. Tübingen doesn't seem to exist at all (maybe too small).

  • For people outside the US (yes, they exist) it'd also be nice to have a site-wide switch to metric. This then won't require you to have two charts of everything either (except snow coverage which doesn't seem to exist in metric).

  • The legends for the charts look a lot like buttons, which can be a bit confusing at first. Maybe it's better to integrate the legend into the charts, e.g. maybe like http://hypftier.de/temp/2017-08-23_090140.png – would also save a bit of space; whitespace currently looks a bit haphazardly applied in general.

  • The animation of the charts seems a bit pointless, considering that they're all below the fold anyway.

• by stinos on 8/22/17, 6:10 PM

  This is really neat! Only thoughts: it assumes one's definition of 'best' is 'best weather' and that in turn means it matches with what your algorithm decides is most pleasurable (which I think it does a pretty good job at). This is probably ok for most people but e.g. I like to travel to see nature and rare species of plants and whatnot, and that completely changes what 'best' is for me as it makes weather not one of the top things to consider.

• by Symbiote on 8/22/17, 7:25 PM

  I was surprised with the cities shown on the map -- nothing from Britain or Ireland, only Odense from Scandinavia, yet five places in Moldova and loads more in Ukraine.

  Looking at Copenhagen [1], the Celsius graph is maxing out at 10°C -- perhaps it would be neater to show a single graph, with a Fahrenheit scale on the left and Celsius on the right. Or just detect that my browser locale is not en_US, and show Celsius...

  Minor thing: metres per second (m/s) is a fairly common wind measurement unit. And it should be km/h, not KPH.

  https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-copenh...

• by sharkweek on 8/22/17, 5:30 PM

  This is great - I think the search functionality could be improved a bit (a lot of results following the one I was looking for that didn't seem related, but the right one did show up first).

  I wonder if there would be a benefit of a "community" element as well, as in allowing comments on the pages, to give locals the opportunity to chime in with their advice.

• by s_kilk on 8/22/17, 9:30 PM

  A tiny bit of feedback...

  > June – August is slow/unreported season for tourism in Edinburgh, so lodging and other accommodations may cost as much as usual.

  This is... odd. In August, Edinburgh has the legendary (Fringe) Festival, a month in which the cities population quadruples, making it easily the most intense month of the year for tourism.

  Maybe the dataset requires some manual tweaking?

• by jeromesalimao on 8/22/17, 10:57 PM

  On the 'Weather in Sydney' page: "The warmest time of year is generally mid-January where highs are regularly around 61.9°F (16.6°C) with temperatures rarely dropping below 50.3°F (10.2°C) at night"

  I think something is off here. That sounds like our winter weather! I would guess our average summer temp would be closer to 30deg C

• by codingdave on 8/22/17, 7:30 PM

  Weather is just one small piece of people's thought process when planning a vacation. But this tool is clearly all about weather... Perhaps finding a new way to describe it other than "the best time to visit" would avoid people coming down on the tool because they want to talk about more than the weather.

• by Eiriksmal on 8/22/17, 6:47 PM

  I love your weather summaries. Your formula nails it with this one: https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-san-di...

  Most weather summaries seem to miss that early/mid-September is significantly hotter than the traditionally hot months of July and August for most locations.

  https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-louisv... > When can you find snow in Louisville? Weather stations report a bit of annual snow likely to be deepest around March, especially close to early March. Powder (new snow) is most often falls around November 12th.

  Seeing powder forecasts for Louisville, KY cracked me up.

• by pkulak on 8/22/17, 6:22 PM

  This seems really off:

  https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-portla...

  It's says the daily highs in the summer are low 60s and that the driest months are in the middle of the winter.

• by Humphrey on 8/23/17, 8:08 AM

  Best time of year is subjective!! All Lonely Planet guide books solve this problems by explaining what each place is like at each time.

  Eg, for Yosemite, it describes how during summer it is rediculosy busy & hot, so you might prefer to go during the shoulder months, but then you risk having some of the park closed for snow. So, "best weather is subjective".

  Likewise, there are many locations, such as Thailand, where the best time to travel is winter. It's too hot in the summer!!

• by Al-Khwarizmi on 8/22/17, 8:15 PM

  Hey, this is really useful! I'll bookmark it and probably use it.

  A few bugs/glitches, though:

  - The Celsius temperature graph for Barcelona ( https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-barcel... ) doesn't show temperatures above 25ºC, so every temperature above that gets cropped to 25. The scale should probably be adapted to the data.

  - "The busiest month for tourism in Barcelona, Spain is May, followed by March and March." March and March?

  - Maybe this is a problem with your dataset and not the app, but just in case, check the snow graph/data for A Coruña: https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-a-coru... - 108 cm of snow in April? I can guarantee the real average is close to zero :)

  - Also in little known tourist destinations (e.g. A Coruña, from the last link) tourism in all seasons is reported as "slow or unreported". Which is true, of course (in the best month in A Coruña you will see much fewer tourists than in a really bad month in Barcelona). But maybe relative data (tourism related to the average in that city) could make sense?

  Keep up the good work!

• by foota on 8/22/17, 7:05 PM

  Anyone here might be interested in https://weatherspark.com/

• by hissworks on 8/22/17, 6:27 PM

  Really neat application of the data. I'm the Director of Marketing at a mid-sized destination marketing organization (DMO) represented on your map (Aurora, Illinois -- we're actually a terrific place to visit in winter!). Curious to learn more about the variables used to deploy the "best time" pages and get a sense for where you'd like to take this further.

• by Zaskoda on 8/22/17, 9:41 PM

  Recommendation: Travel for snow related trips (snowboarding/skiing) would largely depend on average snowpack on a mountain at that time of year, which is directly related to the amount of snowfall in that location as well as the temperature (does it get cold enough for artificial snow making). Build the right tool for planning snow trips and it should be easy to monetize.

• by kristianc on 8/22/17, 7:12 PM

  This is a really interesting idea - the kind of tool that you only realize that you've been waiting for when someone shows you it! As someone who likes to travel quite a bit, this will replace a lot of Google searches for me potentially. Your weather summaries will also be great for SEO and are very well optimised.

  One bit of feedback I'd give is it'd be worth populating with some "temperate" defaults (i.e. normal average temperature, normal humidity etc.). At the moment it seems like it might take a bit of configuring to get to the information you'd want, when it'd seem like you could take an educated guess.

  UI/UX wise I would also make the "date" slider a bit more prominent and maybe have it simply limited to monthly averages (doesn't seem to matter too much if we're talking 2nd or 3rd week of March) for instance.

  Otherwise, really love it, and excited to see the ways people are using Tableau for this kind of thing :)

• by sonium on 8/22/17, 9:04 PM

  The 'when to travel' could be made dependend on where you live. When I lived in Norway I thought 25C is quite warm. Now that I live in south Germany I think 25C is more intermediate. Also in Spring, temperatures feel a lot higher (since I got used to cold winter weather) then by the end of summer (when I got used to hot weather).

• by cakedoggie on 8/23/17, 4:24 AM

  So the best time to visit Sydney is almost the entire year, except for the last 2 weeks of January?

  > February 5th to January 14th

  https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-sydney...

  Love the idea.

• by flavor8 on 8/22/17, 11:47 PM

  Many of the temperature charts have an uptick at the extreme right (end of December), and then (if you imagine them wrapping around to January) have a non-continuous drop at the start of January. I think there's something slightly funky there.

  I saw at least one celsius chart where the data overflowed the maximum (20C) and the plot mashed against the top of the frame.

  You could avoid having to double render the same data (and wasting space) by putting celsius on the right y axis of the farenheit chart.

  Once you fix the bugs, pay a UI designer to give all of the pages a refresh. Work some SEO, and see if you can find a way to give search engine bots all of the various city pages (which I assume you dynamically generate). Throw in some hotel/airline-ticket site affiliate links and you should get a nice stream of income from this.

• by mule76 on 8/22/17, 7:24 PM

  Pretty cool job.

  It would be nice if the user had a few sliders to toggle (heat, humidity, rain, and crowds), rated say 0 to 10 (with 5 meaning don't care), to get around having to select an ideal temperature for everyone. Some people want sun, others want snow, and others don't care about either.

• by otterpro on 8/22/17, 7:26 PM

  Nice website, as I had always been looking for such travel website like this.

  On the travel-weather-map site, I searched for "San Francisco" and the first result was Argentina, and second was Costa Rica. I hope that the result is based on popularity and not based on alphabetical order.

• by wyldfire on 8/22/17, 6:02 PM

  > Tourism graph is based on Google searches for services used by tourists relative to the rest of the year.

  That's a pretty clever way to go about it. I hope/suppose that the sampling bias isn't correlated with time-of-year somehow.

• by kristofferR on 8/22/17, 9:16 PM

  Great site, the UI/design isn't the best though. Improving that will make a huge difference. One of the first things I would do is to make Fahrenheit/Celcius a sitewide setting, like on WeatherSpark.com

• by swampthing on 8/22/17, 7:35 PM

  This is a great idea, and something I always wished existed - kudos! Seems like there's some great opportunities for SEO and advertising here as well - keep rocking!

• by Steeeve on 8/22/17, 7:29 PM

  I don't know if that Tableau map is going to scale to your desired traffic levels. It's a great enterprise tool, and yeah there are a few publications that leverage it, but my instincts tell me to avoid it on a mid-to-high traffic public page. I could be wrong. It's a difficult graph to replicate under fire, but not so hard that a day or two spent on it wouldn't produce a more performant version.

• by eam on 8/23/17, 12:39 AM

  Very interesting to start. I know for a fact that if you travel to Seattle in Jan/Feb it's really cheap, but of course that's because it will be raining a lot. Rain, for some people is not a real problem, but price is. With that in mind it would be cool to find out when is the best time to travel somewhere the cheapest. That would be really useful for me and probably others.

• by wjan on 8/23/17, 7:43 AM

  Cool! I've built similar tool somewhere around 2011. I travel a lot and wanted to have a tool that would help me plan my travels according to specific months. I use it on regular basis since then and it's publicly available at: http://weatherhopper.com

• by clishem on 8/22/17, 9:26 PM

  Something fishy is going on here:

  https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-cuba/

  https://imgur.com/YlM3zda.png

  But really great idea!

• by carbocation on 8/22/17, 8:15 PM

  Immediately after pageload (without interaction), I get the following on Chrome 64 bit (60.0.3112) on Ubuntu 16.10:

  An unexpected error occurred. If you continue to receive this error please contact your Tableau Server Administrator.

  Session ID: 7EBED2C1927841ED9575329CE40EB6F7-0:0

  Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'refreshImages' of null

• by rconti on 8/23/17, 2:01 AM

  Cool idea! I just got back from Austria and was surprised about the rain. Didn't even think to pack a rain coat. Even though I checked the weather beforehand, I figured it was a minor fluke. So hard for a West Coast US person to understand that it rains some places in the summer.

• by hammock on 8/22/17, 8:54 PM

  Great idea, mediocre execution, someone else here please get with OP and help him! This is an awesome tool!

• by neelkadia on 8/23/17, 5:26 AM

  Nice one! Just a thought, apart from atmospheric information; you can add Festival into account. Ex. Let's say Holi in India occurs during March, Kite Festival occurs during January. You can add such thing by just combining few places with Wiki Festivals!

• by zzleeper on 8/22/17, 9:56 PM

  Following the feedback from others, a few things seem odd (for Peru):

  - I tried it with Lima-Peru and it actually suggested a bad time to visit the city: https://championtraveler.com/dates/best-time-to-visit-lima-p... . The weather on winter is quite humid ( http://www.generaccion.com/noticia/imagenes/grandes/188862-2... )so its not the best time to be there, compared to the summer. - Also, on the mountains the season to avoid is the rain season, because it really rains (jan-feb). - Finally, as others pointed, the choice of locations is a bit odd. There are a few smaller towns but for instance Cuzco or Macchu Picchu are not there

• by tmaly on 8/22/17, 8:13 PM

  I like this idea a lot, but there is also on thing to consider, Crowds. The best weather also draws the biggest crowds. This drives up food and hotel prices. If you could somehow factor in the crowds and peak season, you could have a really useful tool.

• by madman2890 on 8/22/17, 7:52 PM

  I'm stoked you built this, as I've had the idea and desired the platform for a while. I do a ton of last minute travel and have semi-unlimited options so it's hard to filter down to the best options that offer what I'm looking for.

• by chis on 8/22/17, 9:05 PM

  I bet you could do this by looking at all the Yelp reviews for an area over time. Some combination of average review score and total review quantity would produce a legit metric.

  But Yelp and Google's APIs aren't really designed for this kind of use sadly.

• by xapxap on 8/23/17, 9:51 AM

  Cool I had a similar idea a month ago when looking for a place to go camping. To find the best weather forecast in a range of $x hours drive. Or the best Weather forecast near direct connected airports from my towns airport.

• by chenster on 8/23/17, 9:58 AM

  The data can essentially be reduced to a single list on one page because the only thing that is really useful is the range of dates for the best time to travel for each location.

  Better yet, add the option to sort the list by dates.

• by vimota on 8/22/17, 9:20 PM

  I would love a feature of this where it supports ranges of weeks or for the whole year. I want to use it to find the best place to live based on my preference of yearly weather!

• by api_or_ipa on 8/23/17, 12:24 AM

  Its funny, it got Vancouver, BC exactly opposite. I'm sure most resident of the notoriously wet city believe July 1-Aug 27 is the best time to visit and not Aug 27-Jul 1

• by averageweather on 8/22/17, 8:22 PM

  Maybe we can partner up :). I made http://www.averageweather.io for a very similar reason.

• by mikekij on 8/22/17, 10:22 PM

  Great work! Although it says the best time to visit San Diego is February through November. I guess that's right though; it's great here any time!

• by pitaj on 8/23/17, 5:34 AM

  It would be great if this included a few more metrics besides weather, like popular tourist times (some people might want to avoid lines and such).

• by reustle on 8/22/17, 6:30 PM

  I did something similar as a little weekend hack a few years ago: http://whengo.io

• by csommers on 8/22/17, 9:47 PM

  I think recos like this need the local input more than anything else, ex: see a ton of the comments below pointing out issues.

  Good start though.

• by helloworld on 8/22/17, 8:30 PM

  The best times to visit San Diego for ideal weather are February to November

  Yeah, that's been my impression, too! :-)

• by corybrown on 8/22/17, 8:08 PM

  This is cool, where do you get the data? I see its from NOAA, but what kind of data files do you get from them?

• by fwx on 8/22/17, 8:11 PM

  This is very cool. Long shot but any chance you can blog about the algorithm used? Or open source the same?

• by hellofunk on 8/23/17, 10:25 AM

  The New York advice certainly is wrong. Hot humid summer is not New York's best experience.

• by hackonit on 8/23/17, 1:05 AM

  I had made something similar in 2013 but was not nearly as complete. Good work. Trekweather.com

• by rocky1138 on 8/22/17, 10:00 PM

  This is really cool, but why is everything in Fahrenheit? How do I make it default to Celsius?

• by pacomerh on 8/22/17, 9:40 PM

  "The best times to visit Ensenada for ideal weather are January 1st to December 30th"

  nice, all year

• by lukasm on 8/22/17, 8:04 PM

  Time to visit Australia is all year long, but what I hear the best is November or February.

• by skdjksjdksjdk on 8/22/17, 9:02 PM

  How do you get number of Google searches programatically? Is there an API or something?

• by nsnick on 8/22/17, 7:42 PM

  This tool doesn’t know about winter destinations. Enter Salt Lake City or Denver.

• by blondie9x on 8/23/17, 12:11 AM

  How does climate change impact your data and site?

• by combinationy on 8/22/17, 7:27 PM

  Would be nice to be able to select degrees celcius.

• by adamzerner on 8/22/17, 9:05 PM

  How about looking at average flight prices?

• by oriettaxx on 8/22/17, 9:57 PM

  cool (°C would be appreciated)

• by horsecaptin on 8/22/17, 6:56 PM

  No results found for Osaka :(