Caribbean Vacation planning in Summer

I just came back from a vacation in Aruba. A friend asked me why Aruba as he thought is was an unusual choice.

I was trying to explain how my choice had a large data driven approach. Then I thought I’d share how I do it.

Why Now

First of lets get the constraints out of the way. Because choosing between “where to go at this time” vs “when to go to place X” needs different data crunching. I had to go now, the time is not a choice and is governed by the fact that I had manageable work load, it is summer and school vacations are on(I cannot go when it is not), I cannot go later during summer because of other engagements. Also I wanted to go relax in a Caribbean destination. So the question came down to where in the Caribbean and I used historical data to make the choice. And boy did that work out!!

Weather Data

First of it is hurricane season in the Caribbean so my first quest was to find a place where I am least likely to be hit by one. For that I headed onto the NOAA site https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes/ which maps all hurricanes at a given place for the last 100 or more years. Choosing Bahamas and then all hurricanes only (not even storms) for June/July shows me the following. So you can make it out that it is a super bad idea.

I did the same search for other popular destinations in that area. E.g. Aruba for the last 100 years, shows not a single one hit this island.

Now that we know a hurricane doesn’t generally hit this place, lets see precipitation data.

So it’s very unlikely to rain either. Wow I am sold already.

Other Data

Obviously weather is not the only criteria. I did similar search with crime rates, prevalence of diseases etc. And then when I narrowed down to the area around the ABC islands (Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire), I finally made my choice on Aruba based on the kind of prices I got on hotels.