Travel Statistics

Travel stats. We all love them. But where’s the best place to go to find out where you’ve been?

IAG, my employer and owner of Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, Vueling and the newly launched LEVEL has been running a corporate accelerator programme for startups, called “Hangar 51“. I’ve been sponsoring the “Data Driven Decisions” category, and one of the startups I’ve been working with is esplorio, an automated travel journal service.

One of the things IAG and esplorio have been working on together is to offer our customers the opportunity to link their esplorio and BA Executive Club accounts, to give them a combined view of their data. Whilst we are sorting out the technical details, I thought I’d do a one person “proof of concept” by manually consolidating my own data.

Esplorio is a relatively young service, but it enables you to link to your Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts. This means that I have data in Esplorio going back to 2011, which was when I joined Foursquare.

My BA data starts in 2004. This is when BA thinks I joined the Executive Club. I’m pretty sure that I joined before this, but maybe BA knows me better than I do.

According to esplorio, I’ve been to 30 countries and have travelled 454,648 miles. BA thinks I’ve been to 24 countries and have flown 351,818 miles. Whilst the two data sources agree on 21 countries, BA missed 9 that esplorio had and esplorio missed 3 so the true total is 33. Which I think demonstrates the power of combining data and also makes me think I’ve spent too much time on a plane.