Data sources
Travel Risk Calculator combines a curated geographic + safety baseline with live public-source intelligence. This page lists every source we draw from, the license under which we use it, and what part of the site it powers.
Geographic base data
| Source | License | What it powers |
|---|---|---|
| SimpleMaps World Cities Database | CC BY 4.0 | City names, ASCII transliterations, coordinates, ISO codes, administrative regions, and population estimates for ~48,000 cities across 241 countries. Imported May 2026. |
City coordinate data on Travel Risk Calculator is provided in part by SimpleMaps under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. We have made no modifications to the underlying coordinate data; we have added our own threat scoring, review status, and editorial review on top.
Official government and intergovernmental sources
| Source | What it powers | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Department of State Travel Advisories | Country advisory tiers (Levels 1-4) and the latest country-specific notice | Every 6 hours |
| CDC Travelers' Health Notices | Health outbreak and disease notices | Every 12 hours |
| GDACS Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System | Active earthquake, cyclone, flood, drought, and volcanic alerts | Every 30 minutes |
| WHO travel advice and Disease Outbreak News | Referenced via CDC and AI-assisted live search | As cited |
Weather, air quality, and environmental data
| Source | What it powers | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| Open-Meteo (weather + air quality + geocoding) | Current weather, 24-hour forecast, derived weather flags (heatwave, heavy rain, etc.), air quality, and city auto-discovery geocoding | Every 30 minutes per city |
| OpenAQ | Cross-reference for air quality where Open-Meteo coverage is thin | As needed |
News and AI-assisted live intelligence
| Source | What it powers | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| Google News RSS | Recent headlines (biased to last 7 days) | Every 1 hour |
| Ollama Cloud Web Search | Primary live search provider for the AI briefing | Per assessment |
| SearXNG (self-hosted) | Fallback live search when Ollama is unavailable | Per assessment |
| Ollama Cloud LLM (gpt-oss:20b-cloud) | AI prose synthesis of the briefing; never sets scores, only writes the summary | Every 6 hours per assessment |
Every AI-synthesized claim cites the snippet ID it was built from. The "Sources the AI drew from" panel on each assessment page shows the actual search results the model saw. See our AI Content Policy for the full grounding and fallback rules.
Editorial baseline (us)
City and country threat-score baselines across 12 weighted categories (crime, health, advisory, political, disaster, transport, environmental, accommodation, arrival time, digital security, money safety, personal modifier) are set by Travel Risk Calculator's editorial team. We draw on publicly available crime indices, government statistics, WHO health-system data, the current US State Department advisory tier, political-stability indices, and well-documented transport/scam patterns. See Methodology for how scores are weighted and combined.
Baseline destination pages are deliberately labeled as estimates. The "reviewed" and "verified" labels indicate how recently an editor has confirmed the data. See Data Review Process for the full lifecycle.
What we do not source from
- Tourism boards or destination-marketing organizations (conflict of interest with neutral scoring).
- Anonymous user-generated content (no Reddit/forum scraping into scores).
- Paid intelligence providers (we want everything to be reproducible from public sources).
- Sponsored content, affiliate-recommended hotels, or "preferred provider" lists.