Kakapo
No Weak Spot
Sub-scores

No Weak Spot

Most "safe" cities have one soft spot dragging them down after dark or in transit. We ranked cities by their weakest of four sub-scores instead of their average — and found the rare all-rounders, led by Luxembourg, whose worst measure still won't drop below 93/100.

Key findings — free to cite

Luxembourg is the most complete city we score: its weakest of four measures — night safety — still sits at 93/100. It has no soft spot to plan around.

  • We ranked cities not by their average but by their lowest sub-score of four — night safety, personal safety, transport and healthcare. A city is only as safe as its weakest measure, and this exposes exactly that.
  • The all-rounders cluster in three places: Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Sapporo, Fukuoka), Switzerland (Zurich, Bern) and the wealthy micro-states (Luxembourg, Monaco, Singapore). Every one holds a minimum in the high-80s or low-90s.
  • The contrast is the whole point. Paris scores a superb 90/100 for healthcare and 81/100 for transport — yet its night safety of 63 drags its weakest measure 30 points below Luxembourg's. On paper it looks safe; on the ground it has one glaring gap.
  • This is the inverse of our companion study, No City Wins Everything, which shows that even the safest cities each have a single weakest dimension. Here we found the rare places where that weakest dimension still isn't weak.
  • Computed from Kakapo's four sub-scores, each measured separately — a breakdown no other travel-safety index publishes.

A city is only as safe as its weakest measure

A single overall safety score hides a lot. Two cities can both land at 88/100 overall while one is evenly excellent across the board and the other is world-class on three measures and mediocre on the fourth. For a traveller, that fourth measure is the one that ends up mattering — the empty late-night walk back to the hotel, the reliability of the ambulance, the pickpocket on the metro. So instead of averaging, we took each city's minimum of four sub-scores and ranked by the highest floor. The winners are the cities with nowhere to get caught out.

The all-rounders: safe whichever way you measure

These are the cities whose weakest dimension is still strong. The highlighted number in each row is that weakest measure — the floor the whole city stands on.

CityNightPersonalTransportHealthcareWeakest measure
Luxembourg, Luxembourg9393939493 Night safety
Monaco, Monaco9393939393 Night safety
Tokyo, Japan9292939292 Night safety
Kyoto, Japan9293939292 Night safety
Osaka, Japan9192929291 Night safety
Zurich, Switzerland9192939491 Night safety
Bern, Switzerland9192939491 Night safety
Sapporo, Japan9192919291 Night safety
Fukuoka, Japan9192919291 Night safety
Singapore, Singapore9292949090 Healthcare
Copenhagen, Denmark8989909189 Night safety
Helsinki, Finland8787888987 Night safety
Vienna, Austria8686909186 Night safety
Oslo, Norway8585889185 Night safety
Why Japan and Switzerland dominate: both pair very low violent-crime and property-crime rates with dense, reliable public transport and top-tier hospitals — the four things we score are all strong at once, so there's no single number to drag the minimum down.

The lopsided famous cities

Now the opposite. These are cities most travellers would call "safe," and by average they are — their healthcare and transport scores are excellent. But rank them by their weakest measure and the picture changes: one dimension, usually after dark, sits far below the rest.

CityNightPersonalTransportHealthcareWeakest measure
Paris, France6364819063 Night safety
Rome, Italy6464768564 Night safety
Barcelona, Spain5960788659 Night safety

Paris is the cleanest example: nothing about its 90/100 healthcare or 81/100 transport is unsafe, but a 63/100 on night safety is what a visitor actually runs into. An all-rounder like Luxembourg never hands you that gap — which is the practical difference between a city that's safe on average and one that's safe on every measure.

How we measured it

Every Kakapo city score breaks into four sub-scores: night safety, personal safety, transport safety and healthcare. For each city we took the minimum of those four and ranked by the highest minimum — the place with the strongest weakest link. We show recognisable major cities; every printed sub-score is the live Kakapo value (Aug 2026) and the weakest-measure column is computed directly from them. Full weighting is at https://kakapo.travel/about/methodology. Scores are comparative model estimates, not official ratings.

Cite this study

Free to cite in journalism, research or content — all we ask is a link back. Copy the attribution below:

Ready-to-use citation
Kakapo Editorial Team (2026). No Weak Spot: The Cities That Are Safe on Every Measure. Kakapo. https://kakapo.travel/blog/no-weak-spot-2026

Writing a travel-safety or destination story? We give journalists custom data pulls at no cost — the full all-rounder ranking, any single sub-score, or a city-by-city weakest-measure breakdown. Email [email protected] and we usually reply the same day.

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Kakapo publishes real safety scores for every destination, drawing on national travel advisories, local crime data, healthcare infrastructure, and night-safety measures. Kakapo Studies is our research imprint — independent editorial, no advertiser influence on scores. Contact: [email protected].