School holidays and busyness

We track school holiday dates from 50+ countries and weight each country by our estimate of how many visitors it sends to each destination. When a feeder country is on school holiday, its weight contributes to that week's crowd pressure score, and we add a smaller lift for peak-season base demand so genuinely busy non-holiday weeks are not shown as empty.

The score uses a logarithmic curve: the first few overlapping countries have the biggest impact, with diminishing returns as more pile on. A week climbs toward the top of the scale when feeder countries representing well over half of a destination's visitors are on holiday at once.

France, Germany and the Netherlands stagger their holidays by school zone. Where we have zone-level dates we count only the share of the country actually off each week, so a single staggered zone is not read as the whole nation being away.

This is a school-holiday proxy weighted by an estimated visitor mix. It is best for comparing weeks within a season, and it does not capture one-off events, pricing, weather-driven day trips, or local domestic crowds.

Select a country to see its feeder-country weighting. “All countries” shows the average across all destinations.

This crowd data feeds directly into our Best Time to Go analysis, where it is combined with conditions scores and pricing to find the optimal weeks.