How We Rate Travel Safety

Safe to Go builds every verdict from official government travel advisories published by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. We pull these three feeds every day and set one verdict per destination from the US level, or from Canada level when the US publishes none.

Advisories describe risk for the average traveler rather than crime statistics.

The Three Government Advisory Feeds

Every rating on Safe to Go starts with data from three governments. We pull feeds daily from the US Department of State, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and the Government of Canada.

The US Department of State evaluates destinations across four clear categories: Level 1 Exercise Normal Precautions, Level 2 Exercise Increased Caution, Level 3 Reconsider Travel, and Level 4 Do Not Travel. US citizens can also enroll trips in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) to receive alerts and be reachable by the embassy.

The Government of Canada uses its own four-tier structure: exercise normal security precautions, exercise a high degree of caution, avoid non-essential travel, and avoid all travel. Canada also adds specific flags for nations that carry regional advisories.

The UK FCDO avoids numerical rankings altogether. Instead, the UK FCDO names areas it advises against all travel to, or against all but essential travel to, either for the whole country or for parts of it.

Mapping Scales and Assigning the Safe to Go Verdict

The primary Safe to Go verdict mirrors the US State Department level when the State Department rates it. When the US State Department does not issue an advisory for an area, such as the US territory of Puerto Rico, we map Canada’s four-tier scale directly onto the same numerical baseline.

We convert the underlying scores into four consistent verdict labels displayed across the site:

• Yes corresponds to Level 1.
• Generally yes corresponds to Level 2.
• Caution corresponds to Level 3.
• No corresponds to Level 4.

Ordering Destinations and Sorting Ranked Lists

Our ranked lists, such as the safest places lists, follow a three-step sort order. We sort destinations first by their primary verdict level.

When destinations share the same baseline verdict, we sort them by the severity of the UK FCDO warning, followed by the Canadian assessment level.

At the time of writing, across 232 rated countries and territories, 99 hold a Yes rating, 83 hold Generally yes, 26 sit at Caution, and 24 carry a No verdict.

Handling Feed Outages, City Pages, and Policy Limits

If an automated government feed encounters a technical failure, our system retains the previous day’s recorded values and marks the entry so that destination panels never display blank data. When an agency revises an official advisory level after we draft a destination guide, the page shows a notice stating that the status changed until the text is updated.

Our city guides combine the national advisory level with whatever the advisories say about the city’s state or region, quoted from the advisory text.

Safe to Go does not publish crime rates. The UK FCDO notes that travel insurance could be invalidated if you travel against FCDO advice.

What Happens When Governments Disagree

We lean on the strictest of the three for the area you are visiting.

Travelers planning an upcoming itinerary should check our latest advisory changes to see recent agency updates before departing.