CRUISEResearchGroup/TripWorld

Trip World

Trip World is a publicly redistributable, METRO-level cross-city travel benchmark. It pairs a large corpus of out-of-town travel sequences with rich Foursquare and Google Maps point-of-interest (POI) metadata and an unified Google reviews corpus. The dataset is designed to support:

• Trajectory recommendation — recommend a sequence of POIs in an unfamiliar city, given the traveller's home-city behaviour and a desired start / end / length.
• Cross-city POI ranking and next-POI prediction — score POIs in a destination region by likelihood for an out-of-town visitor.
• Place modelling — text/category/sentiment work driven by 186 M Google reviews and structured FSQ + Google attributes for 687 K POIs.
• Tourism and mobility analytics — aggregate analyses of travel flows between 1,173 cities in 90+ countries.

The release is built on top of the STD-2018 check-in stream, with metro- consolidation, hometown discovery, traveller filtering, and POI enrichment applied; see Provenance below for the exact pipeline.

Headline statistics

Quantity	Value
Travel-behavior records (τ)	518,567
Distinct travellers	148,402
Hometown regions / destination regions	723 / 1,165
Distinct (hometown → destination) pairs	6,246
Qualifying check-ins	7,416,219
Distinct trails (sessions)	2,723,551
Distinct POIs	687,173
POIs with Google metadata	566,798 (82.5%)
POIs with ≥ 1 review	524,530 (76.3%)
POIs with ≥ 1 text review	516,689 (75.2%)
Total reviews	186,760,186
Reviews with non-empty text	135,355,243 (72.5%)
POIs with extra place attributes (desc / hours / price)	28,776
Distinct cities (Wikidata QIDs)	1,173
Time span	2017-10-03 — 2018-10-20

Geographic coverage is strongest in East Asia and the Mediterranean (Japan, Turkey, Malaysia, USA, Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, Philippines …). See the figures bundled with the source repository for breakdowns.

Definitions

A travel-behavior record captures one traveller's activity around one out-of-town destination. Following the dataset's formal definition, each τ record is a five-tuple

τ = (u, c_h, c_o, r_h, r_o)

with the following components:

Symbol	Meaning
u	the traveller (anonymous integer ID, 1..148,402)
r_h	their identified hometown region (Wikidata city QID)
r_o	the out-of-town destination region (Wikidata city QID)
c_h	the traveller's check-in stream at home around this trip
c_o	the traveller's check-in stream at the destination

c_h and c_o are sequences of (trail_id, venue_id, venue_category, venue_schema, ts) records. Each trail_id identifies a single contiguous session of check-ins (one "trajectory" in the trajectory- recommendation sense); a single τ record may contain several distinct trails on each side because the same traveller can have multiple home sessions and multiple visits to the same destination.

A POI is identified by a Foursquare place ID (foursquare:<24-hex>). Each POI is annotated with a Wikidata-QID locality (the city it belongs to), a Foursquare venue category, a schema.org venue type, and (for ~82 % of POIs) the corresponding Google Maps CID and rich Google metadata.

Layout

trip_world/
├── README.md                          (this file)
├── MANIFEST.json                      — file list with sizes, sha256, and row counts
├── metro_mapping_clean.json           — metro consolidation map (municipality QID → parent metro QID)
├── travel_behaviors.parquet           — 518,567 τ records
├── pois.parquet                       — 687,173 POI summaries (per-POI usage stats + flat google_*)
├── region_labels.parquet              — 1,173 (region_id → city name + country)
├── metadata/
│   ├── metadata_all.parquet           — 687,173 rows; full Foursquare + Google metadata per POI
│   └── place_attributes.parquet       — 28,776 rows; description / hours / price for the most enriched POIs
├── reviews/
│   └── reviews_all.parquet            — 186,760,186 unified Google reviews
└── _scripts/                          — full build-pipeline source code (reproduces the dataset)

Schema (column reference)

travel_behaviors.parquet (518,567 rows)

Column	Type	Notes
user_id	int64	1..148,402, fresh public IDs (see Privacy)
r_h	string	hometown region — Wikidata QID, e.g. Q35178
r_o	string	destination region — Wikidata QID
n_home_ci	int64	total home-side check-ins in c_h
n_travel_ci	int64	total destination-side check-ins in c_o
c_h	list	home check-ins (see element schema below)
c_o	list	destination check-ins (same element schema)

Each element of c_h / c_o is:

Field	Type	Notes
trail_id	int64	1..2,723,551 (fresh public IDs) — same trail can re-appear across τ records
venue_id	string	foursquare:<24-hex> POI key
venue_category	string	Foursquare category UUID (4-byte hex, optional)
venue_schema	string	schema.org venue type, e.g. schema:CafeOrCoffeeShop
ts	timestamp[us, UTC]	observation time

pois.parquet (687,173 rows)

POI-level summary, optimised for the 99 % of analyses that only need the flat columns. Every POI in the benchmark appears exactly once.

Column	Type	Notes
fsq_place_id	string	primary key
locality	string	Wikidata QID of the city
venue_category	string	Foursquare category UUID
venue_schema	string	schema.org type
n_checkins	int64	total check-ins for this POI in the dataset
n_users_visited	int64	distinct travellers who visited
google_cid	string | null	Google Maps customer ID (= place_id in some APIs)
google_name	string | null	Google business name
google_full_address	string | null	Google formatted address
google_address	string | null	Google street address
google_website	string | null	Google business website
google_rating	double | null	average Google star rating
google_num_reviews	int64 | null	Google review count
google_categories	list | null	Google category labels
google_place_id	string | null	Google Places API ID (when known)
google_gmaps_url	string | null	canonical maps.google.com URL
google_meta_source	string	provenance tag identifying which collection step produced this metadata
has_google_metadata	bool	convenience flag
n_reviews	int64	reviews available for this POI
n_reviews_with_text	int64	reviews with non-empty text
review_source	string	provenance tag
has_reviews	bool	convenience flag

metadata/metadata_all.parquet (687,173 rows)

Per-POI Foursquare + Google metadata. Same fsq_place_id primary key as pois.parquet; richer FSQ fields (name, lat/lon, address, country, website, …). Personal-leaning Foursquare contact fields (fsq_email, fsq_tel, fsq_facebook_id, fsq_instagram, fsq_twitter) are intentionally not present.

Notable columns: fsq_name, fsq_latitude, fsq_longitude, fsq_address, fsq_locality, fsq_region, fsq_country, fsq_postcode, fsq_formatted_address, fsq_category_ids, fsq_category_labels, fsq_website, fsq_date_created, fsq_date_refreshed, fsq_date_closed.

The google_* columns mirror those in pois.parquet.

metadata/place_attributes.parquet (28,776 rows)

Rich place-level attributes for the most enriched POIs (descriptions, opening hours, price tier, free-form attributes).

Column	Type	Notes
fsq_place_id	string	join key
google_cid	string	the Google CID this enrichment came from
search_query	string	query used to recover the place
match_dist_m	double	metres between FSQ point and Google point
match_name_sim	double	normalized name-similarity score
description_short	string	one-line description
description_long	string	longer description
hours_today	string	today's opening hours, free-text
hours_week	string	weekly hours, free-text
price_token	string	Google price symbol ($, $$, …)
price_min	string	min price (when known)
price_max	string	max price (when known)
attributes	string	JSON-encoded attribute bag
n_inline_reviews	int64	count of reviews scraped at enrichment time
fetched_at	string	timestamp of enrichment fetch

region_labels.parquet (1,173 rows)

Column	Type	Example
region_id	string	Q100
city_name	string	Boston
country_qid	string	wd:Q30
country_name	string	United States

reviews/reviews_all.parquet (186,760,186 rows)

Unified Google reviews corpus, one row per review.

Column	Type	Notes
fsq_place_id	string	links to pois.parquet
google_cid	string	links to metadata_all.parquet
review_id	string	Google's review ID
rating	int64	1..5
text	string	original review text (may be empty)
text_translated	string | null	Google's machine translation, if any
lang	string | null	BCP-47 language tag
relative_time	string | null	Google's "3 weeks ago" string
timestamp_us	int64	absolute review time, microseconds since epoch
review_time	timestamp[us, UTC]	same value, parsed
owner_reply	string | null	business-owner reply text, if any
source	string	provenance tag identifying which collection step produced this review
author_pid	string	salted blake2b 16-hex pseudonym (see Privacy)

The display name and Google profile ID of each reviewer are removed from the public release; the author_pid column lets you link multiple reviews from the same author within the dataset without exposing real identities.

metro_mapping_clean.json

A JSON dictionary mapping individual municipality QIDs to the parent metro QID used as region_id everywhere else. Useful if you want to recover the original sub-municipal granularity, or extend the mapping.

Quick start

The release uses Apache Parquet throughout; any tool that reads parquet will work. Below are minimal examples in three common stacks.

Python — pandas / pyarrow

import pandas as pd, pyarrow.parquet as pq
ROOT = "/path/to/trip_world"

travel  = pq.read_table(f"{ROOT}/travel_behaviors.parquet").to_pandas()
pois    = pq.read_table(f"{ROOT}/pois.parquet").to_pandas()
regions = pq.read_table(f"{ROOT}/region_labels.parquet").to_pandas()

# How many trips originate from each city?
top_origins = (travel.merge(regions, left_on="r_h", right_on="region_id")
                     .groupby("city_name").size()
                     .sort_values(ascending=False).head(10))
print(top_origins)

Python — DuckDB (recommended for the 23 GB review file)

DuckDB streams parquet without loading everything into RAM and supports the full SQL surface, including joins across files.

import duckdb
con = duckdb.connect()

con.execute(f"""
  CREATE VIEW travel  AS SELECT * FROM '{ROOT}/travel_behaviors.parquet';
  CREATE VIEW pois    AS SELECT * FROM '{ROOT}/pois.parquet';
  CREATE VIEW regions AS SELECT * FROM '{ROOT}/region_labels.parquet';
  CREATE VIEW reviews AS SELECT * FROM '{ROOT}/reviews/reviews_all.parquet';
""")

# Top destinations for travellers from Boston (Q100):
con.sql("""
  SELECT regions.city_name, COUNT(*) AS trips
  FROM travel JOIN regions ON travel.r_o = regions.region_id
  WHERE travel.r_h = 'Q100'
  GROUP BY regions.city_name
  ORDER BY trips DESC
  LIMIT 10
""").show()

# Average review rating per category in Tokyo:
con.sql("""
  SELECT pois.venue_schema,
         AVG(reviews.rating)        AS avg_rating,
         COUNT(*)                   AS n
  FROM reviews
  JOIN pois ON reviews.fsq_place_id = pois.fsq_place_id
  WHERE pois.locality = 'Q1490'   -- Tokyo
  GROUP BY pois.venue_schema
  HAVING COUNT(*) > 100
  ORDER BY avg_rating DESC
""").show()

Iterating over the trajectories of one traveller

import pyarrow.parquet as pq, pandas as pd
tb = pq.read_table(f"{ROOT}/travel_behaviors.parquet").to_pandas()

row = tb.iloc[0]
print(f"User {row['user_id']} travelled from {row['r_h']} to {row['r_o']}")
print(f"  {row['n_home_ci']} home check-ins, {row['n_travel_ci']} destination check-ins")

# Group destination check-ins by trail (= individual trajectory):
import collections
trails = collections.defaultdict(list)
for ck in row["c_o"]:
    trails[ck["trail_id"]].append(ck)

for trail_id, points in trails.items():
    points.sort(key=lambda p: p["ts"])
    venues = " → ".join(p["venue_schema"] for p in points)
    print(f"  trail {trail_id}: {venues}")

Counting reviews per place without loading all 23 GB

con.sql("""
  SELECT fsq_place_id, COUNT(*) AS n_reviews
  FROM '{ROOT}/reviews/reviews_all.parquet'
  GROUP BY fsq_place_id
  ORDER BY n_reviews DESC
  LIMIT 20
""".format(ROOT=ROOT)).show()

Common join patterns

To go from …	… to …	Join key
τ record	hometown / destination name	travel.r_h = regions.region_id (and r_o)
τ record	per-POI usage / Google meta	element venue_id = pois.fsq_place_id
τ record	full FSQ + Google metadata	element venue_id = metadata_all.fsq_place_id
POI summary	rich place attributes	pois.fsq_place_id = place_attributes.fsq_place_id
POI summary	reviews	pois.fsq_place_id = reviews.fsq_place_id
Reviews	place-level Google ratings	reviews.google_cid = pois.google_cid
Reviews	author identity (within set)	reviews.author_pid (no external linking)
Region	municipalities folded into it	metro_mapping_clean.json[municipality_qid] == region_id

Privacy and redaction

The following transforms have been applied relative to the build-time working set so the release can be redistributed without exposing individual identities:

1. User IDs. user_id in travel_behaviors.parquet is remapped to a fresh consecutive 1..148,402 sequence; original STD-2018-derived IDs are not present.

2. Trail IDs. trail_id inside each c_h / c_o element is likewise remapped to a fresh consecutive 1..2,723,551 sequence.

3. Reviewer identity. Reviewer display names (author) are removed entirely. The original numeric Google author_id is replaced with a salted blake2b pseudonym author_pid (16 hex characters per author). The salt is generated at release time and kept private; cross-review author linking remains possible inside the dataset but cannot be inverted to a real Google profile.

4. Foursquare contact fields. The columns fsq_email, fsq_tel, fsq_facebook_id, fsq_instagram, fsq_twitter are dropped from metadata_all.parquet.

5. Review text. Review bodies are kept verbatim (they are the dataset's primary signal). Users of this release should be aware that user-generated text may incidentally contain personal references and should treat downstream analyses accordingly.

If you discover residual identifying information that we missed, please contact the maintainers so it can be redacted in the next release.

Reproducibility

The build-pipeline source is shipped under _scripts/ for documentation and audit purposes. Re-running it end-to-end requires several external data sources that are not part of this release — see the table below. The released parquet files are the canonical artefacts; the scripts let you verify how they were produced and re-derive subsets you may need.

What the scripts can re-derive

Stage(s)	Output	External data needed
0–6	metro map, τ records, POIs, region labels	STD-2018 raw check-in CSV
7	per-POI Foursquare metadata	Foursquare Open Source Places parquet dump
10	extra FSQ enrichment for new POIs	Foursquare Open Source Places parquet dump
11	FSQ-API rescue of unresolved POIs	Foursquare Places API key
12–13	UCSD-bridge Google metadata for new POIs	UCSD all20 + benchmark POI corpus
14–16	merged Google reviews + place attributes	raw GCP scrape shards (not redistributable; the scrape code is not included)

In other words, the structural side of Trip World (τ records, POIs, region labels, FSQ metadata) can be reproduced if you supply STD-2018 and an FSQ-OS dump. The Google reviews corpus cannot be re-derived from this release alone — it is provided as a static parquet because the scrape that produced it is not redistributable.

Configuring paths

All scripts read their filesystem locations from environment variables so the source tree contains no personal paths. Defaults assume the script is launched from inside the release's _scripts/ subfolder.

export TRIP_WORLD_ROOT=/path/to/trip_world           # default: ../ relative to the script
export STD_2018_PATH=/path/to/std_2018.csv           # raw STD-2018 stream
export FSQ_OS_PARQUET_GLOB="/path/to/fsq_os/places/parquet/*.parquet"
export PRECURSOR_BUILD_ROOT=/path/to/previous_build  # optional; an earlier output of this pipeline whose POI metadata and reviews stages 5/7/8/16 inherit from. Omit unless you are rebuilding incrementally on top of a prior run.
export GMAPS_FULL_ROOT=/path/to/gmaps_full_dataset   # optional, only for stage 12
export DUCKDB_TMP_DIR=/tmp/duckdb_trip_world          # any large local scratch directory
export FSQ_API_KEY=fsq3...                            # only if running stage 11

Stage-by-stage map

_scripts/00_build_metro_map.py            — metro consolidation map (Wikidata SPARQL)
_scripts/01_consolidate_filter.py         — apply consolidation, filter to MIN_PAIR
_scripts/02_hometown_discovery.py         — temporal-decay hometown identification
_scripts/03_build_travelers.py            — split travellers / non-travellers
_scripts/04_build_travel_behaviors.py     — emit τ records
_scripts/05_build_pois.py                 — per-POI usage stats
_scripts/06_build_region_labels.py        — Wikidata-derived city names
_scripts/07_subset_metadata.py            — slice FSQ-OS metadata
_scripts/08_subset_reviews.py             — slice reviews
_scripts/09_validate.py                   — invariants + descriptive stats
_scripts/10_enrich_new_pois.py            — local-dump enrichment for new POIs
_scripts/11_fsq_api_recover.py            — live FSQ Places API recovery
_scripts/12_ucsd_bridge.py                — UCSD all20+bench match
_scripts/13_merge_ucsd_into_metadata.py   — merge UCSD matches into metadata
_scripts/14_merge_gcp_search_results.py   — merge Stage-1 GCP scrape shards (shards not shipped)
_scripts/15_merge_stage2_reviews.py       — merge Stage-2 listugcposts shards (shards not shipped)
_scripts/16_unify_reviews.py              — final review unification
_scripts/lib_wikidata.py                  — small Wikidata helper
_scripts/viz_clean_raw.py                 — descriptive figures
_scripts/viz_traj_length.py               — trajectory-length figure

No API keys are embedded in any released script; stages that hit external services (Wikidata SPARQL, FSQ Places API) read credentials from environment variables or CLI flags exclusively.

Citation

If you use Trip World in academic work, please cite the accompanying paper (BibTeX entry to be released alongside the official publication).

License

The Trip World release is distributed for non-commercial research use only. Redistributions must preserve this README and the provenance scripts in _scripts/. Use of the dataset implies acceptance of the upstream Foursquare Open Source Places licence and the Google Maps Platform Terms of Service for any further analysis that re-fetches data from those services.

Released on 2026-05-05.