Rick Steves' Europe episodes — episodes • steves

One row per episode of the public-television travel series Rick Steves' Europe (2000-2025), 159 episodes across 13 seasons. Editorial fields (title, synopsis, theme_tags, region, primary_destination, episode_type, is_retired) are curated; the rest are derived from public sources and joined back on (season, episode_in_season) or on the IMDB title id.

This dataset was compiled from public sources for teaching purposes and is not an official or verified Rick Steves' Europe dataset. It is shared with the permission of the Rick Steves' Europe team.

Usage

episodes

Format

A tibble with 159 rows and 38 columns:

overall_episode: Integer. Series-wide episode number, 1–159.
season: Integer. Season, 1–13.
episode_in_season: Integer. Episode within season.
season_episode_code: Character. "S01E01" style code.
title: Character. Episode title (Rick Steves' canonical wording).
synopsis: Character. One-line editorial summary.
theme_tags: Character. Semicolon-separated themes, e.g. "Food & Cuisine; History & Heritage".
episode_type: Character. "Standard" or a special category.
is_retired: Character. "Yes" if the video has been pulled from ricksteves.com, "No" otherwise.
primary_country: Character. Main country featured.
all_countries: Character. Semicolon-separated list of countries when the episode covers more than one.
region: Character. Show-specific region label, e.g. "Iberia", "British Isles", "Mediterranean".
primary_destination: Character. Main destination string used for geocoding.
iso2: Character. ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, or "ZZ" for multi-country compilation episodes.
flag: Character. Country flag emoji derived from iso2; the globe emoji for multi-country rows.
lat, long: Numeric. WGS84 decimal degrees of the destination. For multi-country rows, the unweighted centroid of capital cities listed in all_countries. NA when no single coordinate is meaningful (e.g. travel-skills compilations).
geo_match: Character. How the coordinate was resolved: "full" = exact destination, "simple" = first place name, "country" = country fallback, "centroid" = capital centroid.
original_air_date: Date. Original PBS air date.
air_year, air_month, air_weekday: Year (integer), abbreviated month, abbreviated weekday derived from original_air_date.
days_since_premiere: Integer. Days since the series premiered on 2000-09-03.
gap_since_prev_episode_d: Integer. Days since the previous episode aired, in chronological order.
imdb_tconst: Character. IMDB title id, e.g. "tt1453776".
imdb_url: Character. Direct link to the episode on IMDB.
imdb_rating: Numeric. Raw IMDB user rating (1–10), NA for episodes with no votes recorded.
imdb_votes: Integer. Number of user votes on IMDB.
imdb_rating_shrunk: Numeric. Bayesian-shrunk rating that pulls low-vote ratings toward the show mean (~7.75); always populated. Recommended for sorting/ranking when vote counts are uneven.
imdb_low_votes: Logical. TRUE when imdb_votes < 10; flag for UIs to show a "few votes" caveat.
image_url: Character. Episode hero image (mostly YouTube thumbnails extracted from ricksteves.com og:image). NA for retired episodes whose pages were removed.
image_source: Character. Provenance of image_url: "ricksteves.com", "tvmaze", or "wayback".
best_summary: Character. Richest available description (ricksteves.com og:description > TVmaze summary > synopsis). Always populated.
summary_source: Character. Provenance of best_summary.
best_runtime: Integer. Runtime in minutes (canonical PBS slot, usually 26).
watch_url: Character. Streaming URL on ricksteves.com, where available.
tvmaze_url, tvmaze_id: TVmaze episode page and numeric id; useful as a secondary deep link or to call the TVmaze API.

Source

Source: Rick Steves' Europe (compiled dataset). Compiled from public sources for teaching purposes; not an official or verified Rick Steves' Europe dataset.

Editorial fields curated from https://www.ricksteves.com/
IMDB ratings from https://datasets.imdbws.com/ (non-commercial use).
Geocoding via OpenStreetMap Nominatim through the tidygeocoder package.
Episode metadata from https://api.tvmaze.com/shows/9872 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Steves%27_Europe.

Examples

library(steves)
head(episodes)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 38
#>   overall_episode season episode_in_season season_episode_code title    synopsis
#>             <int>  <int>             <int> <chr>               <chr>    <chr>   
#> 1               1      1                 1 S01E01              Portuga… Portuga…
#> 2               2      1                 2 S01E02              Paris: … Paris; …
#> 3               3      1                 3 S01E03              South E… Souther…
#> 4               4      1                 4 S01E04              Heart o… A trip …
#> 5               5      1                 5 S01E05              Caesar'… Rome; F…
#> 6               6      1                 6 S01E06              Germany… A class…
#> # ℹ 32 more variables: theme_tags <chr>, episode_type <chr>, is_retired <chr>,
#> #   primary_country <chr>, all_countries <chr>, region <chr>,
#> #   primary_destination <chr>, iso2 <chr>, flag <chr>, lat <dbl>, long <dbl>,
#> #   geo_match <chr>, original_air_date <date>, air_year <int>, air_month <ord>,
#> #   air_weekday <ord>, days_since_premiere <int>,
#> #   gap_since_prev_episode_d <int>, imdb_tconst <chr>, imdb_url <chr>,
#> #   imdb_rating <dbl>, imdb_votes <int>, imdb_rating_shrunk <dbl>, …

if (requireNamespace("dplyr", quietly = TRUE)) {
  dplyr::count(episodes, primary_country, sort = TRUE)
}
#> # A tibble: 31 × 2
#>    primary_country     n
#>    <chr>           <int>
#>  1 Italy              29
#>  2 Multiple           20
#>  3 United Kingdom     20
#>  4 France             15
#>  5 Germany             9
#>  6 Spain               9
#>  7 Turkey              6
#>  8 Austria             4
#>  9 Greece              4
#> 10 Portugal            4
#> # ℹ 21 more rows