We started this project asking four questions: where do Europeans travel, when, how, and how much. By the end the data had answered most of them. But three things genuinely surprised us. Each is supported by a specific chart in the preceding chapters, and each is the kind of pattern that the raw spreadsheets never reveal at a glance.
Before 2020, Germany was the top foreign visitor source for the largest number of Swiss cantons. Americans led only two. By 2024, the United States had become the largest single foreign source for five of the country's biggest tourism hubs: Zurich, Bern, Geneva, Valais and Lucerne. The shift to Zurich, Bern and Valais happened in 2023, two years after travel resumed.
Recovery itself is bifurcated. Geneva, Aargau and Neuchatel grew arrivals by roughly +20% from 2019 to 2024. At the other end, Obwalden lost 21%, Uri 15%, Zug 13%. The cantons that overshot are urban. The ones that stagnated are small alpine resorts. Whatever Switzerland was before 2020, it is not the same destination now.
Across Europe, the top seven destinations absorb the vast majority of all tourist nights. Zoom inside any one country and the picture repeats: Veneto carries Italy, the south carries France, the Alpine arc carries Austria. Most of the rest sits comparatively dark on the map.
Switzerland is the same shape one zoom level deeper. Five of 26 cantons absorb most of the country's arrivals. Inside the calendar, two months absorb most of those arrivals. Inside each canton, a few origin countries send the bulk of the foreign visitors. The structure is not a uniform distribution at any level - it is concentration repeated fractally.
The origin map across Europe fills almost entirely with neighbors. The further away a country sits, the rarer it appears as a top source. Switzerland mirrors this: Germany alone sends over 1.5 million arrivals from roughly 450 km away; beyond 1,500 km the numbers collapse to near zero.
Wealth is a much weaker predictor. Norway, Ireland and Luxembourg sit among Europe's highest GDP per capita (PPS) yet send relatively few visitors to Switzerland. The one consistent counter-example is the United Kingdom - over 1,000 km away yet sending hundreds of thousands of visitors. The pattern suggests that cultural ties and established travel habits may matter more than income alone.
The exploration does not end here. The data still contains many patterns and questions worth exploring further.
EUFlow is built entirely on public statistical data. Every chart loads its data directly from CSV or JSON files in the repository. The data went through a preprocessing pipeline and was rendered in the browser with D3.js.
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