Data Visualization Final Project

Project Description

This is my final project for my Data Visualization for Storytelling course, an analysis of tourism intensity, hospitality wages, and COVID-19 recovery across all 67 Florida counties. I worked with three government data sources, BLS employment and wage data, Florida Department of Revenue taxable sales data, and BEBR population estimates, importing and linking them in Tableau to build population-normalized, county-level comparisons. The project centers on two research questions: whether counties with higher hotel taxable sales show stronger hospitality employment and wages relative to population, and how COVID-19 affected hospitality employment differently across theme-park-heavy versus beach-destination counties. I built six visualizations, including an animated choropleth map of tourism revenue intensity, a tourism-dependency bar chart, a wage-versus-revenue scatter plot, and an interactive dual-variable line chart comparing hotel sales and employment trends by county over time. The findings show that tourism intensity closely tracks hospitality workforce concentration, that revenue and wages are only loosely linked, and that theme-park counties like Orange suffered the sharpest COVID losses but also drove the fastest revenue recovery through pricing power. The full report includes a written analysis addressing both research questions and proposes follow-up research directions around short-term rentals, income inequality, and weather-related disruption. This project demonstrates my ability to design a multi-source Tableau analysis from raw government data through to a polished, narrative-driven visual report. Attached is the workbook and report.