Everyone says avoid August. My dataset of 67 cities says that's only true in Europe.

I run Vientapps, a free travel tools site. I maintain structured JSON files for 75 airlines and 67 destinations with things like baggage rules, daily costs, and seasonal crowd levels.

With August trip-planning season coming up, I ran a simple test: for each of the 67 destinations, what's the crowd level in August? The "avoid August" rule is one of those things everyone repeats but nobody quantifies.

Here's what the data shows, by continent:

• Europe: 22 of 23 cities hit peak crowd. Madrid is the only near-exception.
• North America: 15 of 24 cities peak. Mexico and the tropics break the pattern.
• Asia: 0 of 11 cities peak. Zero. Seoul, Bangkok, and Taipei are all low-crowd.
• Africa: 0 of 3 cities peak. Though Cairo at 109°F is empty for a reason.
• South America: 0 of 4 cities peak. Buenos Aires is in winter at 64°F.
• Oceania: 0 of 1 peak. Sydney is also mid-winter.

The rule is real in Europe. It falls apart everywhere else.

The 16 low-crowd destinations aren't secret or obscure. They're just priced for off-season while most travelers pile into Europe and pay the 2-3x August premium on flights and hotels.

I built this dataset originally because I needed example destinations for our packing list tools and group trip planner (Roamly). Turning it into a data essay was a way to test whether the structured data I already maintain can pull its weight as a content asset too.

Full analysis with charts and a downloadable CSV of all 67 cities: https://vientapps.com/blog/67-destinations-august-crowd-test-2026/

Curious whether other builders here have found ways to turn their structured data into outreach content. What worked?