Data Visualization for NYT Travel Article

About the data/article in a nutshell: This New York Times article, backed by numbers from government agencies for the US & Canada, attempts to show whether International Travel into the US has dipped as a result of President Trump’s administration and policies relating to broad tariffs, tight border control, etc. The main takeaway is that while travel originating from Asia into the United States has timidly increased, that from Europe has stalled, meanwhile that of Canada has sharply decreased, especially when it comes to car crossings into the US; relative to air travel. Despite a drastic drop for US bound travel from Canada, overall, travel into the United States has remained fairly undisturbed.

On my choices here, I decided to replicate/plot all outputs (minus the second one) with at best identical data points and visuals, and/or matching as much as possible the ones that were PNG (images) embedded into the article (as opposed to scrips/tables/or otherwise HMTL wrappers containing actual data points). With a solid few weeks time span having passed between article publication date and the time of this writing, and given that the numbers reported at the time were fairly recent, numbers on March 2025 when the article gets published in April 2025, any preliminary numbers that might have got adjusted since then will not allow for 100% match in said numbers.

The one piece that I don’t replicate in this project is the second one; “International arrivals at major U.S. airports”; it’s embedded into the article as a PNG, and would require a lot of work to reverse engineer the foundational data series behind it after scanning said PNG; but more importantly, I try to go for replicating new/unconventional visualizations when this one specifically, at the end of the day, albeit powerful, boils down to a couple of line plots. If you like to give the original article a read, you can find it here.

Overall Strategy for building first plot: One way to recreate the first visual; which shows in a report-card style the % change in flight bookings into the US comparing (Jan 1st through April 26, 2024) to (same period this year), and looking at 1) overall (International), 2) European, 3) Asian, and 4) Canadian inbound travel; is to generate 4 tiles with a subtle vertical tick/separator between each of those said 4 percentages. The time frame of visits for both years covers Summer; which allows for ‘apples to apples’ comparisons but also focuses on an upcoming period of the year - very near future, meaning that said bookings are more likely than not to be definitive for a vast majority of them.

Below code chunk loads in libraries used and configures and activates/sets a couple of themes to be used throughout the code