How we score

Where the data comes from

• Four governments. Travel advisories from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and (where reachable) Australia — each an independent read on the same country. When they disagree, we show you all of them and flag it.
• World Bank governance data. Political stability and rule-of-law estimates from the Worldwide Governance Indicators.
• CDC travel health notices. Active disease and outbreak warnings, by level.
• UN homicide statistics. UNODC intentional-homicide rates — the crime sub-score's backbone.
• ACLED political-violence data. Recorded political-violence events and fatalities over the trailing year (via the UN's Humanitarian Data Exchange), blended into the political sub-score so it reflects what's actually happening, not just perception indices.
• Numbeo city crime indices. Resident-submitted crime perception per city — this is what powers the city pages' crime numbers.
• WHO road safety data. Estimated road traffic deaths per 100,000 population — the roads sub-score's backbone.
• INFORM Risk Index. Natural-disaster hazard exposure (earthquake, flood, tsunami, cyclone, drought, epidemic) from the EU Joint Research Centre and partners — the nature sub-score's backbone.
• Real traveler chatter. Reddit threads (quoted with links) and Wikivoyage safety sections (attributed, CC BY-SA) — words, never numbers.
• UK FCDO terrorism briefings. Real per-country prose, shown as-is with attribution — not a score. No dataset gives a clean per-country terrorism-risk number without inventing a severity heuristic, so this stays words, never a fabricated number.

More sources — terrorism data, women's-safety indices — are still being wired in. Until a source is live, we leave its sub-score off the page rather than invent a number.

The math

The overall score is a weighted blend of the sub-scores we actually have data for, each normalized to 0–100 (higher = safer). If a source is missing for a country, its weight is redistributed across the rest — we never treat "no data" as "zero."

The hard caps

Some situations override the arithmetic entirely. A slow-moving governance index shouldn't keep a country's score high when a war just broke out, so:

• • Any government's "do not travel" advisory caps the score at 39 ("Nope.").
• • Two or more governments at "avoid non-essential travel" caps it at 54.
• • An active CDC Level 3 health notice caps it at 64.

The verdicts

What we won't do

We don't hide the sources — every country page has a "show the receipts" section linking the exact feeds behind its score. We don't let language models set numbers; they only write the plain-English summaries, and only from cited facts. And we don't pretend a quiet data gap is a safety guarantee. Right now 195 countries are scored; the rest of the planet is coming.