The Tourist Concierge Dashboard
MIDS Capstone Project Spring 2016

Tourist Concierge

Our Mission

The tourist concierge is a data analytics platform to assist you on finding that perfect dream location destination!  According to a CNN Poll, the most important factors in choosing a vacation destination is safety & security as well as cost.  However, understanding current safety and cost information is only good for the time being, it is just as important to know what they will for the actual time of travel.  Finally, there are so many countries on Earth, how will a potential traveler know which ones they will enjoy?  The tourist concierge was created to address all of these concerns.

Note: This concierge is only intended for US Travelers going abroad.  The information was not prepared for tourists originating from other locations.

Our project

All of the above concerns are answered with the three pillars that this project stands on: safety information, currency/cost information and country information.

Using the GDELT dataset, we are able to derive and then predict a country's safety using a Machine Learning algorithm.  We have a 80% success rate predicting what that score will be one week, one month and three months out.

Using the International Monetary Fund we forecasted currency exchange rates with the US Dollar along with a cost of living index which we used to directly compare countries costs.

Travel websites were used that collected key words and phrases from each country.  These countries were then clustered together based on similarity and those similar features are used as filters to help travelers find countries they will enjoy.  Using safety and cost information, the user is able to find similar countries to the selected one, that are safer or cheaper.  

All of these pillars together come together to allow a person to find that perfect dream destination.

Last updated:

March 30, 2017