How we score travel safety

Every IsMyTripSafe report answers one question — is this place safe to visit? — with a 0–100 score (100 = safest) built the same way for every destination. Nothing on a report page is hand-written per city; everything is computed from the sources below, so scores are comparable across destinations.

The composite index

The backbone of the score is a weighted composite of 20+ indicators, grouped into violent crime, conflict & terrorism, institutions & rule of law, everyday hazards, health & environment, and official guidance. The heaviest single weights go to the homicide rate (~20%), political stability (~16%) and the official government advisory level (~12%); the rest is spread across victimisation surveys, governance percentiles, road safety, air quality, natural-hazard alerts and health notices. Indicators with no data for a destination are skipped and the remaining weights renormalised — a missing survey never silently counts for or against a place.

Raw values are normalised onto a 0–100 safety scale with piecewise bands calibrated per indicator (e.g. a homicide rate of 1/100k ≈ 92, 20/100k ≈ 30). Governance percentiles are used as-is. When a primary source has no data, the pipeline falls back through independent secondary databases (UNODC via Our World in Data, WHO, V-Dem), then regional aggregates — each fallback labeled as such on the report.

AI field research — and how it's bounded

Databases lag reality, so each report also includes AI-assisted field research: an agent searches current news and traveller reporting for recent incidents, unrest, district-level safety, scams and sentiment, with the database profile and official advisories supplied as fixed ground truth it must not contradict. Its street-crime ratings and traveller-sentiment read contribute 25%of the final published score; the databases keep 75%. Advisory levels are never AI-generated — they are shown verbatim from the issuing governments' own feeds. We disclose this on every report because you should know which parts are measured and which are researched.

Traveller-type adjustments

Per-traveller scores (solo, family, nightlife, 65+) are deterministic re-weightings of the already-computed category scores — extra weight on crime for a solo nightlife trip, on health & care for families and older travellers, capped so the general score stays the backbone. Same inputs, same number, every time.

Update cadence & dates

Live feeds (advisories, air quality, disaster alerts, weather) are fetched at report build time. A report's "last updated" date is the moment its data was actually rebuilt — we never bump dates without rebuilding the data behind them. Reports are rebuilt on demand once they're older than seven days.

Limitations

• Most statistical indicators are national; city-level nuance comes from Numbeo (where cities have enough contributors), OpenStreetMap, live environmental feeds and the field research.
• Survey-based indicators (victimisation, feeling safe at night) can be years old — every value shows its year on the report.
• Crowdsourced indices reflect perception, which can diverge from recorded crime.
• A score is a summary, not a guarantee. Conditions change fast; check your government's advisory before you travel.

Every source we use