No black boxes
How we score
Every Sketch Score is produced by math, not vibes. Here's the whole recipe — including the parts we're still building and the things we deliberately refuse to guess.
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.
- Real traveler chatter. Reddit threads (quoted with links) and Wikivoyage safety sections (attributed, CC BY-SA) — words, never numbers.
More sources — road-death rates, 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."
advisory consensus · weight 0.40
political stability (0.7 WGI + 0.3 ACLED violence rate) · weight 0.25
health notices (CDC) · weight 0.20
crime (UNODC homicide rate) · weight 0.20
rule of law (WGI) · weight 0.15
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
85–100 Go.
70–84 Go, but pay attention.
55–69 Go with a plan.
40–54 Think twice.
0–39 Nope.
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.
Sketch Scores are informational opinions synthesized from public data, not professional security advice. Always check your own government's official travel advisory before you go.