Interesting and Disturbing Travel Statistics

MSNBC: Ever wonder how much hotel soap travelers use or how much bacon they eat?

Apparently, the folks at Travelmatch, a U.K.-based price comparison site, have. Their latest effort, cheekily titled “Pigs, Planes and Urine,” takes a look at some statistics you won’t find in your average DOT or hospitality report.

Among the findings — enticing, disgusting or otherwise:

2.38 billion: The number of slices of hotel bacon travelers eat per year. At 340 slices per porker, that’s equivalent to 7 million pigs per year, or one whole hog every five seconds.

984 million: The number of pounds of hotel soap travelers use in a year. According to the number-crunchers at Travelmatch, that’s enough for an 86-billion-gallon bath, something you’ll appreciate when you consider ...

17 percent: The percentage of Americans who admit to peeing in the pool. Extrapolating that statistic to the global travel market, that’s equivalent to 19 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled to the brim with stuff you don’t want to swallow.

77 million: The number of cubic yards of sandcastles vacation children make per year — enough granular grandeur to make 24 copies of the Great Pyramid at Giza or fill 57 Empire State Buildings. (Soap and a soak anyone?)

237 million: The number of empty seats on planes per year. Gather them all up and it works out to 522,026 empty 747s, a humongous fleet in which one could supposedly fit 13.8 billion snakes.

Skeptics, no doubt, will scoff at such statistics, especially the millions of travelers who haven’t seen an empty seat since long before Samuel L. Jackson shared a plane with some of those aforementioned reptiles.

But according to Travelmatch co-founder and CEO Alex Francis, there’s more to the numbers than mere entertainment. “When compiling the statistics behind this piece, we were shocked by the magnitude of some of the numbers we were encountering,” he said. “The travel industry is an incredibly important part of the modern economy and it accounts for a large portion of the global GDP.”

How large? Let’s go to the numbers again:

99 million: The number of jobs supported by the travel industry worldwide, which according to Travelmatch, equates to 1.4 people out of every 100 on the planet.

$5.99 trillion: The number of dollars the human race spends on travel each year, enough money to buy 1,331 aircraft carriers or an iPad and iPhone for every person on the planet.

We’ll pass on the aircraft carriers but would go for the iPad/iPhone deal in a heartbeat. It would give us something to do when we’re staying out of the pool.