Visualising International Tourist Arrival

by Pairach Piboonrungroj
email: me@pairach.com
twitter: @piboonrungroj

This is a test for an R Markdown document using my analysis of tourist data of Thailand.
You may see the original post in my website

Tourism is an important sector in the global economy. In many countries, tourism is the main source of revenue, Thailand is one of them. However, tourism sector is a fast moving sector. It is very sensitive to various factors and also vulnerable. The tourism markets for each destination (country) are also very diverse. Tourism data are available and updated frequently. One of the most important report of national tourism statistics; number of tourist arrivals from each country of origin, their average length of stay and total receipt or expenditure. These tourism statistics are important but often reported separately due to the limitation of software used by analysts.

The following are the steps to produce a comprehensive profile of international tourists in Thailand in 2005 with ggplot2 package in R.

1: Import data into R

exp05 <- read.csv("http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46344142/thai_tour_2005.csv", 
    head = TRUE)

2: Load 'ggplot2' package for plotting elegant data visualisation

library(ggplot2)

## Need help? Try the ggplot2 mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/ggplot2.

3: Specify x and y axis, label, size of the bubbles and colour of the region

exp <- ggplot(exp05, aes(x = number, y = length, label = country, 
    size = receipt, colour = region))

4: Create a plot and add texts to x and y axis

exp + geom_point() + geom_text(hjust = 0.7, vjust = 2) + labs(x = "Number of Tourist Arrivals", 
    y = "Length of Stay (days)") + scale_area("Receipt (M. USD)") + scale_colour_hue("Region")