The one-sentence version
Every score on this site is a 0–10 rating where higher is better for you, built from multiple sources, tagged with how confident we are, dated, and shown alongside what it's based on. If a number can't carry all of that, we'd rather not publish it than publish it bare.
The 0–10 scale
All scores use the same direction: higher is better for the traveller. A 9 for night safety means a woman can move around at night with little concern; a 3 means real caution is warranted. This sounds obvious, but a lot of travel data mixes directions — high "crime index" bad, high "safety score" good — and forces you to reread the legend for every number. We never do that. Across every axis, up is good. Once you learn that once, you never have to think about it again.
Scores are not raw statistics. A crime rate is an input, not an output — we don't publish "23.4 incidents per 100,000" and call it a rating, because that number doesn't tell a solo traveller what to do. Scores are calibrated judgements built from those inputs plus lived reports, expressed on a scale designed for decisions.
The ten axes
We rate ten things separately, because "is it good for solo women" is really ten different questions that trade off against each other:
- Daytime safety — moving around alone during the day
- Nighttime safety — the same after dark, which behaves differently
- Harassment-free — freedom from street harassment and unwanted attention
- Transport — safety and ease of getting around, including late
- Solo dining — how comfortable it is to eat alone
- Meeting people — how easy it is to find company if you want it
- Health — healthcare access and quality for a traveller
- Walkability — how walkable and navigable the place is on foot
- English — how far you get in English
- LGBTQ — safety and acceptance for LGBTQ travellers
A city can be excellent on daytime safety and only fair after dark; wonderful for eating alone and hard for meeting people. One blended score hides exactly the trade-offs a solo traveller needs to see. Ten axes let you weight what matters to your trip — because a first-timer, a digital nomad, and a woman over 50 are not optimising for the same thing.
Confidence: how much to trust each number
A score is only as good as what's behind it, so every score carries a confidence level built from two things:
- Sample size — how many reports, reviews, and data points the score rests on. A rating from a few thousand experiences is sturdier than one from a few dozen, and we don't pretend otherwise.
- Source diversity — how many independent sources agree. Two hundred reports that all trace back to one viral post are not two hundred sources. We weight for genuinely independent signals converging.
A high-confidence, well-agreed score and a low-confidence, thin-sample score can both read "8/10" — so we show the confidence, because you should trust them differently. Where a specific axis rests on thinner data than the city overall, we mark that axis down individually rather than letting the city's general confidence flatter it.
Sources and dates on everything
Two rules we don't break:
- Every score shows its sources. Where a number comes from is part of the number. A rating you can't trace is an opinion wearing a lab coat.
- Every score shows when it was last updated. Safety changes. A neighbourhood shifts, a transport line opens, a situation evolves. A confident-looking score with no date is a trap — it reads as current whether or not it is. Dating everything is how we keep old data from quietly masquerading as new.
Why we decompose safety
This is the methodological choice we care about most, so we'll say it plainly. We refuse to publish a single "safety" score, because collapsing petty theft, harassment, and violent crime into one number is the most common way travel data misleads women.
These three risks have completely different odds and different defences. A city can be pickpocket-heavy and violence-light — very common, and it should score high on the risk that's rare and lower on the one that's likely, so you prepare for your phone and relax about the rest. Blend them and you get a middling number that's true of nothing and useful for nothing: it either scares you off a safe city or lulls you in a place with a real, specific problem. Decomposing safety is more work and it's the entire point of the site.
What this method can't do
Being rigorous includes being honest about the edges — thin samples, perception versus reality, coverage and identity gaps. That's important enough to have its own page. Read what our data can't tell you before you lean too hard on any single score. The limits are not a disclaimer we bury; they're part of the method.