Started looking for a tourism dataset on Kaggle for a new project. Found one with real UNWTO data, but it only went up to 2022 — not enough for what I wanted (post-COVID trends).
Then found a better-looking one: "Global Tourism & Travel Trends (2019-2024)," 24 upvotes, great coverage range. Almost picked it on the spot.
Then I actually read the full description. Turns out it's synthetic — 10,000 generated records, not real recorded stats.
Had to rename the whole project: from "Travel Recovery Analysis" to "Travel Behavior & Satisfaction Trends (2019-2024)" — same dataset, just honest framing. Still great for practice: 33 features, zero nulls, covers spend, satisfaction, eco-choices, transport modes.
Anyone else ever almost build a project around the wrong assumption about their data? 👀