Why this page exists
Most sites bury their limitations in a footer nobody reads, or don't admit them at all. We put ours on their own page, near the front, because a decision engine is only trustworthy if it's honest about where it runs out. Knowing what our data can't tell you is part of using it well.
Here is what to hold in mind whenever you read a score.
Scores are perceptions and indices, not guarantees
This is the most important limit. A high safety score means that, across many reports and sources, this place tends to be safe for solo women — the odds are good. It does not guarantee your specific trip. Safety is probabilistic. Bad things happen in safe places and good trips happen in risky ones; a score shifts the odds in your favour, it doesn't fix the outcome.
So use scores the way you'd use a weather forecast: excellent for deciding what to pack and plan around, useless as a promise about your particular afternoon. A 9 for night safety means "you can reasonably move around at night here" — not "nothing can go wrong." Keep the safety playbook habits regardless of the number. A good score lowers the base rate; it doesn't replace your own judgement on the ground.
Some samples are thin
We rate cities on how many reports and sources sit behind each score, and we mark the thin ones with lower confidence. But you should understand what "low confidence" actually means: it means trust this number less and lean harder on other sources — not that we've quietly rounded it up to look complete.
A newer or smaller city on our list may rest on a fraction of the data behind a major one. The score is our best current read, and it will move as more reports come in. Where a specific axis (say, healthcare, or eating alone) has thinner data than the city overall, we mark that axis down individually. When you see medium or low confidence, treat the number as a starting point to corroborate, not a verdict to bank on.
There are identity gaps
Our data reflects who reports the most, and that's not everyone equally. The women who file reviews, post in communities, and answer surveys skew in particular ways — by age, background, nationality, and travel style — and their experience of a place is not universal.
Concretely: a place that feels easy for one woman may be read very differently by a Black woman, a visibly Muslim woman, a disabled traveller, a trans woman, or an older solo traveller — because the place responds to them differently, and because fewer of their reports may be in our dataset to begin with. Our LGBTQ axis is a start at this, not a solution. Where we can't speak to an identity-specific experience with real data, the right move is to say so and commission that perspective from within the relevant community — not to generalise from a sample that doesn't include it. Take our scores as one input, and weight community voices that share your specific situation.
There are coverage gaps
We can only rate what we cover, and coverage is uneven by design at this stage.
- Geographic gaps. Our city list is a launch set, weighted toward destinations solo women actually search for most — which skews European and East Asian. Whole regions are thin or absent. Absence from our data is not a judgement on a place; it's a gap in our coverage, and it's the wrong thing to read as "avoid."
- Granularity gaps. We rate cities, and safety is often a neighbourhood-and-hour matter. A city score can't capture that one district is fine and another isn't after dark. We're honest about this in our destination writing, but a single city number will always be coarser than the reality on the street.
- Freshness gaps. Everything carries a last-updated date, but the world moves faster than any dataset. A recent change may not be reflected yet. Cross-check anything time-sensitive against current, on-the-ground sources.
Why we tell you all this
This page could make our data look weaker. We publish it anyway, because the alternative — a confident product that hides its soft spots — is how travel content loses the reader's trust the first time reality contradicts a too-clean number.
77% of women trust solo-female-travel communities as much as friends and family, and only 35% trust influencers. That gap is about honesty: people can tell the difference between information that levels with them and marketing that flatters them. Being clear about our limits is not a weakness in the product. It is the product. Read the methodology for how the scores are built — and read this page for how far to trust them.