Data Visualisation Challenge: Airline Holiday Travel

I recently spend about 8 weeks as a public transport commuter rather than cycle commuter and had the opportunity to listen to a lot of podcasts (some of which I've already posted about). One that I really enjoyed was Story Telling With Data which is where I heard about the monthly challenge that Cole runs.

The December challenge was to make a holiday themed visualisation so I decided to investigate how travel patterns change in the holiday period, which for Australia is about a quarter to half of December and all of January.

The data set I found was for international departures from Australia however the destinations appear to be only to the first stop of the flight. Unfortunately the data did not include spatial information for the airports or the standard airport codes so I had to do some wrangling to make everything work. This and the fact it took me a while to draw out the interesting (and communicable) insights meant that I well and truly missed the challenge deadline but I wanted to share it anyway.

Because I wanted to provide some explanation and context to the visuals I made mine as an R Markdown document that can be viewed as an html page here:
 It was great to find a way to incorporate both graphs and maps into the visualisation to provide both a summary and some details of the holiday travel patterns.

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