Say you want to visit The Louvre Museum in Paris but want to see as few of the other 19,000 tourists that are also going to grace its galleries with their presence on the same day.
How do you work out what time to visit?
Sure, you can ask at your accommodation or a tourist information centre (which are great go-tos) or you can spend time trawling reviews and forums to find out.
Or, now you can use Google Maps to get the hard data and save yourself some time.
Enter in the attraction and you’ll get a wealth of information including reviews, directions and opening hours (I wouldn’t have known it was closed on Tuesdays or opens late on Wednesdays and Fridays.)
Scroll further down and the big brother data that Google and other tech companies collect will give you a graph of when attendance peaks each day by the hour.
As you’d probably expect, the least crowded times to visit on a Wednesday are the first two hours and the last three:
That helpful dotted line will let you know when the peak is across the whole week, which ends up being Saturday at 3pm, so you’ll definitely want to avoid visiting then:
Finding the crowd
On the other hand, you may actually want to be at a place like a bar or nightclub when it isn’t deserted, and it can be notoriously difficult in other countries (especially in Europe with cultures more skewed towards late nights) to work out when to arrive.
If you want to visit the London megaclub fabric, you’d be best being there for the peak at 1am on a Friday:
but on a Saturday it peaks a little later at 2-3am:
Planning ahead
If you want to drop your friend or partner off at Sydney or Melbourne Airport, for example, this feature will show you that on Mondays and Fridays at 9am is when both airports reach their highest capacity, meaning you can plan for traffic, security and immigration delays more accurately.
Summing up
This helpful feature is available on the desktop, iOS and Android versions of Google Maps.
Featured image courtesy Flickr.
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