Every safety score is built from four parts — night, personal, transport and healthcare. So which one decides the rating? Across all 1,012 scored cities, the overall verdict tracks night safety most tightly (Pearson r = 0.87) and healthcare least (r = 0.79). When the data calls a city "safe", it mostly means safe after dark — which is exactly why you should still read the healthcare number on its own.
Across all 1,012 scored cities in the Kakapo index, a city's overall safety rating tracks its night-safety sub-score more tightly than any other dimension — Pearson r = 0.87. When the data calls a place "safe", it mostly means safe after dark.
Every Kakapo city score is built from four sub-scores — night safety, personal safety, transport safety and healthcare. That raises an obvious question almost no one tests: when a city gets a high overall rating, which of those four is doing the work? Is "safe" mostly about crime? About getting around? About whether a hospital can help you? So we measured it directly. For all 1,012 cities that have an overall score and all four sub-scores, we computed the Pearson correlation between each sub-score and the overall rating.
The four correlations are all strong — these sub-scores genuinely move together — but they line up in a clear order. Night safety tracks the overall rating most tightly at r = 0.87, personal safety is a whisker behind at 0.86, transport sits at 0.83, and healthcare trails at 0.79.
| Sub-score | Correlation with overall (r) | What it captures |
|---|---|---|
| Night safety | 0.87 | How safe the streets feel after dark — the fear most travellers actually carry |
| Personal safety | 0.86 | Day-to-day crime against people: assault, theft, harassment, scams |
| Transport safety | 0.83 | Road danger, transit crime and the reliability of getting around |
| Healthcare | 0.79 | Medical care for a visitor who is injured or falls ill |
This is not an accident of the model — it reflects what safety is for most travellers. The fear people actually carry is street crime and the walk home after dark, and those two dimensions capture it. Because they move together so tightly and both track the overall score at the top of the range, a city that scores well on crime-and-fear scores well overall. That is the reassuring part: an overall Kakapo score is a faithful summary of the thing most people mean when they ask "is it safe?"
The lowest correlation is the most useful one. Healthcare tracks the overall rating the least (r = 0.79), which means it is the dimension most able to disagree with the headline number. A city can be calm, walkable and low-crime — a high overall score — while its medical backstop for an injured visitor lags well behind. The overall score, weighted as it is toward street safety, won't fully warn you about that. If your trip carries physical risk, the healthcare sub-score is the number to check on its own.
Because the sub-scores are measured independently, some cities show a single dimension diverging hard from the overall verdict — the exceptions that prove the rule. A few recognisable examples:
| City | Overall | Diverging sub | Sub-score | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caracas, Venezuela | 42 | night | 5 | −37 |
| Guatemala City, Guatemala | 63 | night | 28 | −35 |
| Tulum, Mexico | 80 | night | 50 | −30 |
| Playa del Carmen, Mexico | 81 | night | 50 | −31 |
| Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe | 82 | healthcare | 47 | −35 |
| Siem Reap, Cambodia | 72 | healthcare | 40 | −32 |
Two patterns show up. In places like Tulum and Playa del Carmen, an otherwise pleasant, high-scoring destination hides a night-safety score far below its rating — the daytime resort town that changes character after dark. In places like Victoria Falls and Siem Reap, the divergence is healthcare: a well-liked, broadly safe destination where the nearest capable hospital is the real gap. In every one, the single sub-score tells you something the overall number smooths over.
An overall safety score is a strong, honest summary — but it is a summary, and it leans toward how safe a place feels on the street. Trust it for the crime-and-fear question it mostly answers. Then, before you book, glance at the two sub-scores most likely to surprise you: night safety if you'll be out after dark, and healthcare if your trip carries any physical risk. The headline gives you the city's character; the sub-scores tell you where it breaks from type.
We queried the live Kakapo index for every city with a non-null overall safety score and all four sub-scores present, deduplicated by city (keeping the largest-population entity and excluding New York's boroughs) — 1,012 cities in all. For each of the four sub-scores we computed the Pearson correlation coefficient against the overall safety score across that full sample, then ranked them. Scores draw on national travel advisories from seven governments plus crime, transport and healthcare data; full weighting is at https://kakapo.travel/about/methodology. Scores are comparative model estimates, read live, so the numbers match the rest of the site.
Free to cite in journalism, research or content — all we ask is a link back. Copy the attribution below:
Kakapo Editorial Team (2026). What 'Safe' Actually Means: The Sub-Score That Decides a City's Rating. Kakapo. https://kakapo.travel/blog/what-safety-means-2026
Writing about how travel-safety ratings are built? We give journalists custom data pulls at no cost — the full correlation table, the sub-score breakdown for a specific country or region, or the city-by-city divergence list. 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].