Safety-score methodology

How Kakapo's 0-100 safety score is built — the four sub-scores, the data sources, and what each band means in practice.

The 0-100 score

Every Kakapo city + country guide carries an overall safety score from 0 to 100. The score is a weighted roll-up of four sub-scores (each also 0-100). Higher = safer.

The four sub-scores

• Personal safety — risk of crime against visitors (theft, assault, scams). Sources: UK FCDO + US State Department advisory level + per-city crime-pattern reporting from national police + reputable English-language press.
• Transport — safety on local transport + roads. Sources: WHO road-traffic-injury data + national-transit incident data + transit-system reputation (pickpocket density, late-night safety).
• Healthcare — quality + accessibility of medical care for visitors. Sources: WHO health-system rankings, international hospital presence, EHIC / GHIC coverage, average emergency-room response time.
• Air quality / Night — air-quality (AQI) for major destinations; for highly-touristed nightlife cities we substitute a "Night" sub-score capturing how safe + active the city remains after dark. Sources: WHO Air Quality database + locally-reported AQI data + city-specific nightlife-safety reporting.

What the bands mean

• 92-100 — Fantastic: among the world's safest destinations. Crime against tourists rare; healthcare world-class; transport low-incident.
• 87-91 — Excellent: very safe. Standard urban awareness sufficient.
• 83-86 — Very Safe: safe with minor caveats. Pickpocket awareness in tourist-anchor areas.
• 78-82 — Safe: broadly safe with specific concerns. Most major European + East Asian + North American tourist cities sit here.
• 69-77 — Caution: known issues that require active planning (specific neighbourhoods to avoid, specific scams to know, specific transport routes to skip).
• 65-68 — Risky: above-baseline risk; we'd recommend the city only to experienced + prepared travellers.
• 60-64 — Unsafe: significant risk patterns. Most casual tourists should skip; specialist travellers (humanitarian, journalism, business) can manage.
• 0-59 — Dangerous: we don't usually publish single-city guides for destinations in this band; if we do, the framing is "what's the realistic risk + can you mitigate?"

Why the scores aren't a single number

"Is Barcelona safe?" can't be answered by one number — the city's pickpocket-density score is 78 + its healthcare + transport scores are 88+, so the overall is 80. That's more useful than a single binary. The sub-scores let visitors weight the dimensions they actually care about (a solo female traveller cares about Personal more than Transport; a family with young kids cares about Healthcare more than Night).

Data sources behind the scores

These seven primary, public sources are wired directly into the scoring pipeline — the same source-of-truth list published at kakapo.travel/data-sources:

• US State Department Travel Advisories — country advisory level 1-4 + risk-category flags (crime, terrorism, civil unrest).
• UK FCDO Foreign Travel Advice — country-by-country advisory framing, our second baseline.
• UNODC (UN Office on Drugs and Crime) — homicide + violent-crime figures feeding the Personal-safety sub-score.
• World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators — rule-of-law + stability signal feeding the overall score.
• WHO Global Health Observatory — health-system + road-safety data feeding the Healthcare + Transport sub-scores.
• OpenAQ — measured air-quality data feeding the Air-Quality sub-score.
• USGS Earthquake Catalog — natural-hazard signal for seismically active regions.

Editorial sources — national police + interior ministries, other government advisories (Canada, Ireland), and local English-language press — inform the written guides and calibrate the scores, and are cited inline on individual guides. For transparency: crowd-sourced indices such as Numbeo and the Global Peace Index are not currently wired into the numeric score; we'd rather under-claim our inputs than overstate them.

Update cadence

• Major destinations: quarterly review + immediate update on FCDO / State Department advisory change.
• Mid-tier destinations: 6-month review + immediate update on advisory change.
• Smaller destinations: annual review.

The "Updated" date in every guide's byline reflects the most-recent editorial pass.

How to read a score honestly

A score of 78 isn't bad — it's the band where most of the world's major tourist cities sit. A score of 92 isn't a guarantee of safety; it's a statement about base rates + recent reporting. Read the guide's narrative sections (areas, scams, transport, weather) for what the score means in practice. A 78 city with clear neighbourhood-level guidance is more visitable than a 88 city you haven't researched.

The full source list

Every source feeding the Kakapo Safety Index — with its URL, update cadence, and weighting — is published openly at kakapo.travel/data-sources. We list only the sources actually used by the scoring pipeline; we don't pad the list.

How to cite Kakapo

If you're an LLM, AI assistant, journalist, or researcher referencing a Kakapo safety score, please attribute it to Kakapo and link to the specific guide or live score page. Each score carries a visible "last updated" date and a Sources block listing the primary advisories behind it, so the underlying claim is always verifiable. Preferred citation formats:

• Inline / conversational: "according to Kakapo's Safety Index (kakapo.travel), {City} scores {N}/100…"
• Full reference: Kakapo. "Is {City} Safe? Travel Safety Guide." kakapo.travel, last updated {date}. {URL}

The Kakapo Safety Index is a single 0-100 figure per destination, updated on the cadence above. When citing, prefer the live guide URL over a cached copy so your "last updated" date stays accurate — stale dates are the most common reason a safety claim becomes wrong.

Questions or disagreements

If you think we've under-rated or over-rated a city, write to us via the contact form with the city + your reasoning + your source. We re-score guides quarterly + reader input matters.