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, facility, and demographic datasets
| 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. |
| GeoNames | CC BY 4.0 | Elevation, time zone, alternate municipal spellings, and administrative names. |
| OpenStreetMap Contributors | ODbL 1.0 | Hospital care facilities, emergency infrastructure, diplomatic missions, and urban points of interest retrieved via Overpass. |
| OurAirports | Public Domain | Global airport registry, IATA/ICAO designations, scheduled commercial service flags, and nearest airport calculations. |
Geographic and infrastructural records on Travel Risk Calculator are compiled from SimpleMaps (CC BY 4.0), GeoNames (CC BY 4.0), © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), and OurAirports (Public Domain). Underlying geographic coordinates are preserved; proprietary threat calculations, safety tiers, and analytical summaries are layered 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 |
| UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) | Official foreign travel advice, safety alerts, local laws, and entry requirements. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. | Daily |
| Global Affairs Canada | Official Canadian Travel Advice and Advisories normalized to 1-4 scale. | Daily |
| USGS Earthquake Hazards Program | Historical earthquake catalog (M ≥ 5.0) for 5-year seismic hazard profiles within 100 km of evaluated municipalities. | Weekly |
| 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 |
| INFORM Risk Index (European Commission, Joint Research Centre) | Conflict intensity, access to health care and natural-hazard exposure per country (score layers security, health, natural hazards). Licence CC BY 4.0. | Twice a year (checked monthly) |
| World Bank Open Data — Worldwide Governance Indicators and intentional homicide | Political stability and absence of violence (WGI) and homicides per 100,000 people (security and crime layers). Licence CC BY 4.0. | Checked monthly |
| UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (Uppsala Conflict Data Program) | Deaths from organised violence in the last 12 months, per country and within 100 km of each city (security layer). Licence CC BY 4.0. | Weekly check of monthly releases |
| 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.
How the sources become a score
City and country pages show one score built from five layers — security, crime and scams, health and medical access, natural hazards and current alerts — each calculated from the sources above. The formulas and weights are ours and are published on the Methodology page. The nine safety categories shown on some pages come from our earlier editorial baseline and are kept as supporting detail. The interactive calculator adds trip-specific factors (accommodation, arrival time, personal profile).
Local notes on city pages are written and approved by our editors; see Editorial policy and Data Review Process.
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.