Submitted by Salil Mehta of Statistical Ideas [4]
Travel Post-ISIS
It’s enjoyable just to think about how Americans create their travel itineraries. Planning such an adventure generally encompasses factors such as whether the trip will be exciting, rewarding, relaxing, and safe. Ideally, no part of the globe should be excluded for tourism based upon these factors. But now we have had an obvious rise in global terrorism, [5]in the past couple of years. Americans have been more startled than ever, as the Middle East has devolved into an even more unsettling place. Da'ish (ISIL) is literally butchering its way into the headlines. A Malaysian [6], and then a Russian, passenger planes have both been blown out of the skies. Military aircraft too have been subject to childish target practice. Refugees have been illegally washing ashore, or frantically running with suitcases across Europe and into the Americas. Wise people are often picking international flights that do not pass over these increasingly unruly skies, centered about this general part of the world. One could be forgiven to hypothesize that there would be some negative response in the travel to the Middle East. Instead as shown below, this regional hotbed continues to see a stunning record growth in passenger traffic from America. And this unusual growth stands out as the highest of any destination.
Perusing the government tourism data [7]below, you’ll see something stimulating. When Americans pull out their passports for air travel outside of North America, from 2011-2013 (pre-ISIL), the strongest annual growth was to the Middle East. Further, instead of this passenger growth tamping down with terror concerns, the annual growth from 2013-current (post-ISIL) is also the strongest (with one of the largest changes in growth rates among all regions post-ISIL!)
This travel to the region, appears to be taking the “don’t give in to the terrorists” political jingo a bit too far. And these are not reasonably innocent places to venture. Of the about 200 independent nations that the U.S. government tracks, nearly 40 (or a generous 20%) are on the State Department’s travel warning list [8]. See these color mapped below.
[9]
And no surprise here, there is a great overlap between the Middle East or similar countries (in red), and this official do-not-travel-to regions. In fact, 17 of nearly 22 Middle East regional countries (~77%) are on this former warning list.
Some may want to slice and dice this analysis, arguing that this former embattled segment of the Middle East could have seen a decrease, but then reallocating all of the overall explosive and diverse number of passengers to just the remaining 23% would only suggest the "friendlier" (such as Egypt or Tunisia, both of which on the top link above proves to still be perilous) segment of the Middle East saw an even more unfathomable boost. Now expressing these joint probabilities above differently, but to the same impact, we can state that nearly 11% of all countries are in the Middle East or representative region [10], yet ~40% of the U.S. government’s restricted travel-to list are in the Middle East (again colored red instead of blue).
Let's read some of the climactic language of the U.S. State Department warning American tourists from the visiting the Middle East:
"The Department of State continues to warn U.S. citizens against all travel ... and strongly recommends that U.S. citizens remaining ... depart immediately. ... the security situation remains dangerous and unpredictable as a violent conflict between government and armed anti-government groups continues throughout the country, along with an increased risk of kidnappings, bombings, murder, and terrorism."
Or:
"Travel ... remains very dangerous given the security situation. The ability of the Embassy to assist U.S. citizens facing difficulty, including arrest, is extremely limited. Private U.S. citizens are strongly discouraged from traveling ... to join in armed conflict."
These are not ringing endorsements. So this rush in air travel to this hazardous theater defies what one would levelheadedly expect! And so are many natural phenomenon we think about and then probabilistically analyze. Why are so many different Americans unexpectedly taken to traveling to the Middle East region? It's a perfect abnormality.
For example, we can note from varying sources (Arab-American Media, Pew Research, University of Connecticut and Brandeis University Center for Judaic Studies) that the non-North America based population from the Middle East region represents ~3.5% of the U.S. population. Yet from the absolute government travel data, travel to this region represents ~7% of the same share. So a large absolute number (~2 million) of passengers are travelling to the Middle East region, and at nearly twice what you would expect relative to the mix in Americans’ ethnic backgrounds. And travel to these hot spot ranks as the 5th most popular, of the 8 regions noted further above.
