How Warnely rates country safety. The headline risk score is a composite of four signals weighted 50/30/15/5. Every input is documented below, with sources, review cadence, and the things the score is not designed to tell you.
Every country in the Warnely dataset carries a single 0–100 risk score (lower is safer) and a five-tier label. The score is a weighted composite of four independent signals:
| Component | What it measures | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial | Six-category editorial assessment of typical traveller risk | 50% |
| Authority signals | UK FCDO and US State Department travel advisories (worst-of) | 30% |
| Structural indices | Global Peace Index and World Governance Indicators | 15% |
| Live signal | 30-day rolling incident pressure from the Warnely wire | 5% |
Formula in full: score = 0.50 × editorial + 0.30 × authority + 0.15 × structural + 0.05 × live. When a component is missing for a country (a small structural-index data set leaves about 17 countries without GPI or WGI coverage), the remaining weights are renormalised so the formula still sums to 100.
All four components sit on the same 0–100 risk scale, where 0 is the lowest risk and 100 the highest. The four are deliberately independent. Authority signals capture official government advice, structural indices capture long-run institutional health, the live signal captures short-term volatility, and the editorial layer is the categorical breakdown that the other three cannot resolve at the kind of granularity a traveller actually uses (drug law, women's safety, LGBTQ+ status, scams, transport reliability, and so on).
The dominant input. An editorial 0–100 risk score for each country, derived from six category scores. Each category gets a 1–5 rating; the headline editorial score is a weighted roll-up of the six.
| Category | What it covers | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Crime | Violent crime, theft, scams, kidnapping risk for tourists | 20% |
| Terrorism | Terror threat level, recent attacks, regions to avoid | 20% |
| Natural disasters | Earthquakes, cyclones, floods, volcanic, wildfire risk | 15% |
| Health | Disease prevalence, water safety, healthcare quality, evacuation needs | 15% |
| Civil unrest | Protests, political instability, ethnic or sectarian tensions | 15% |
| Infrastructure | Road safety, transport reliability, communications, utilities | 15% |
The combined verdict of two authoritative government advisories. Both are scraped daily and stored alongside the country record.
The two sources are combined worst-of. The authority component on the 0–100 risk scale is the maximum of the two source signals, mapped as follows:
| Source | Code or level | Value |
|---|---|---|
| FCDO | Advise against all travel (whole country) | 95 |
| FCDO | Advise against all travel (parts of country) | 70 |
| FCDO | Advise against all but essential travel (whole country) | 60 |
| FCDO | Advise against all but essential travel (parts) | 30 |
| US State | Level 4: Do Not Travel | 95 |
| US State | Level 3: Reconsider Travel | 70 |
| US State | Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution | 20 |
| US State | Level 1: Exercise Normal Precautions | 0 |
So a country at FCDO advise-against-all-essential (whole country) plus US State Level 3 takes the worst-of: 70. Multiplied by the 30% authority weight, that contributes 21 points to the composite. The original FCDO and US State labels are preserved verbatim on every country guide.
Long-run institutional health, captured by two indices that change on years not weeks. The structural component is a weighted blend of:
Both indices are converted to the same 0–100 risk scale, blended, and applied at 15%. The component is omitted (and the remaining weights renormalised) for the 17 countries without coverage in both indices, mostly small Pacific island states.
The 30-day rolling incident pressure from the Warnely wire. The wire ingests Reuters, BBC, AP, AFP, Al Jazeera, Guardian, USGS earthquake feed, GDACS, ReliefWeb, Met Office severe weather, EA Floods, and several other safety-relevant feeds. Incidents are classified, geocoded, and severity-rated by a downstream pipeline.
The live component is computed as min(100, 5 × incidentCount + 2 × severeCount) across the last 30 days for the country. Multiplied by the 5% live weight, a single severe incident in the window contributes 0.35 to the composite. Twenty incidents (most of them routine) contribute 5.
The weight is intentionally low. A small static weight protects the composite from churn during transient news cycles. The wire itself is exposed on every country guide as a separate live-alerts panel so travellers can read short-term signal alongside the static rating without one swamping the other.
| Composite score | Tier label | Level |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 20 | Very Safe | 1 |
| 21 to 35 | Exercise Normal Caution | 2 |
| 36 to 55 | Exercise Increased Caution | 3 |
| 56 to 75 | High Risk | 4 |
| 76 to 100 | Do Not Travel | 5 |
Boundaries are calibrated against the two government sources so a country at tier 4 or 5 on the Warnely scale almost always carries an FCDO advise-against and a US State Level 3 or 4.
Every country guide carries a visible Last reviewed date and a Next review by commitment. The cadence is tied to the country's current risk tier:
| Current tier | Review cadence | Next review window |
|---|---|---|
| Do Not Travel (5) | Quarterly, with rolling daily sweeps of the FCDO and US State pages | 90 days |
| High Risk (4) | Quarterly | 90 days |
| Exercise Increased Caution (3) | Half-yearly | 180 days |
| Exercise Normal Caution (2) | Half-yearly | 180 days |
| Very Safe (1) | Annual, with daily authority-signal monitoring | 365 days |
Authority signals (FCDO and US State levels) are refreshed daily across all 180 countries regardless of tier, so changes there propagate within 24 hours even when the editorial layer is not due for review. The full editorial layer is what the cadence above governs.
Country profiles draw on a mix of authoritative public sources and Warnely's own incident data. An editor reads each source and synthesises the picture for travellers rather than scraping blindly.
The default composite answers a single question: what does the average traveller's risk profile look like in this country? The dashboard's View as selector reweights the same category scores to answer the question for a specific kind of traveller. The underlying category data does not change. Only the rollup does.
The persona-weighted score is shown alongside the default with a delta versus default indicator so the shift is visible. The weighting rules:
The persona is persisted in the URL (?persona=soloFemale) so a link can be shared with the right read already applied.
The full 180-country dataset is published as a CSV under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Researchers, journalists, and anyone embedding a country score should pull from this file rather than scraping the country pages.
180 rows. One per country. Updated daily for authority signals. Editorial layer updated on the cadence above.
Download data.csv ↓| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| iso2 | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code |
| iso3 | ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code |
| name | Country name (en-GB) |
| region | One of: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Middle East, Oceania |
| risk_score | Composite 0 to 100 (lower is safer) |
| risk_tier | One of: Very Safe, Exercise Normal Caution, Exercise Increased Caution, High Risk, Do Not Travel |
| editorial_score | Editorial 0 to 100 component score |
| authority_score | Authority 0 to 100 component score |
| structural_score | Structural 0 to 100 component score (blank where GPI/WGI absent) |
| live_score | Live 0 to 100 component score |
| fcdo_status | Semicolon-separated FCDO codes (e.g. avoid_all_travel_to_parts_of_country) |
| state_level | US State Department advisory level 1 to 4 |
| drug_law_tier | One of: death, severe, strict, moderate, decriminalised, legal |
| lgbtq_legal | Six-tier legal status (marriage / partnership / legal / hostile / criminalised / death) |
| lgbtq_social | Five-tier social climate (progressive / accepting / mixed / conservative / hostile) |
| women_safety_tier | Five-tier women's-safety rating |
| gpi_rank | Global Peace Index rank (latest edition) |
| last_reviewed | ISO date of most recent editorial review |
| next_review_by | ISO date of next scheduled review |
Citation: Warnely country risk dataset, accessed [date], https://warnely.com/methodology/data.csv. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Every country profile carries a structured visa block: type (six categories), length, cost, official application URL where applicable, and a paragraph note covering recent changes. Six visa types, colour-coded:
Critical caveat: this data assumes a Western traveller (UK, US, EU, Canada, Australia, NZ passport). Other passports face very different requirements. Sometimes more permissive (Indian and Chinese passports get free 30-day visa-free entry to Mongolia and Iran where Western passports need eVisas), often more restrictive. For any non-Western passport, the official answer is the IATA Travel Centre. Every visa block links there directly.
Recent changes flagged in the data:
Always re-verify within a week of booking. Visa policy changes faster than any other safety data. New requirements, fee changes, and document validity rules can shift on weeks-not-years cadence. The note on each block highlights what changed recently; the IATA link gives the authoritative current answer.
Drug law mistakes by tourists are a leading cause of foreign-citizen prosecutions, and the consequences can include the death penalty. Every country profile carries a structured drug-law block with three signals: severity tier, cannabis-specific status, and a paragraph traveller note covering the things that actually catch travellers out.
Six severity tiers, colour-coded:
The cannabis status is broken out separately because it is the most common traveller-relevant question and the legal landscape has shifted dramatically in the last five years. What was illegal a year ago may be legal now and vice versa (Thailand legalised in 2022 then re-restricted in 2024).
Specific traveller traps the notes call out:
Sources: UK FCDO drug warnings per country, US State Department travel advisories, Harm Reduction International's annual death-penalty-for-drugs report. Always cross-check the FCDO page (linked from each block) before travel. Drug laws change faster than most other safety data.
Every country profile carries a structured Women's Safety rating with a one-paragraph traveller note. Five tiers, colour-coded:
Notes are deliberately specific. What kind of hassle, where, and what reduces it, rather than generic "exercise caution." The rating reflects current consensus from women-traveller communities, government advisories, and published assault statistics. The Warnely editorial line is to err on the harsher side when sources disagree.
Every country profile carries a structured LGBTQ+ Travellers block with three signals: legal status, social climate, and a one-paragraph traveller note covering PDA, scene visibility, dating-app risk, and any recent enforcement trends. Six legal-status tiers:
Five social-climate tiers (progressive, accepting, mixed, conservative, hostile) capture lived experience separately from the legal status. A country can be legally permissive but socially conservative, or the reverse. The Warnely editorial line grades conservatively: when in doubt the country gets the harsher rating.
Always verify on Equaldex. LGBTQ+ law changes faster than most other safety data. New criminalisation bills, court rulings, and enforcement shifts happen on weeks-not-years cadence. Every block links directly to the country's Equaldex page so a traveller can check current status and recent enforcement before booking. The persona-weighted score for LGBTQ+ travellers boosts Crime and Civil Unrest as a proxy until this data is integrated into the live signal.
Every country profile carries a daily-budget block (backpacker, midrange, luxury) in local currency with USD equivalents, and a structured tipping note covering restaurants, taxis, and hotel staff specifically. Not just a generic "10% at restaurants."
Two principles guided the fill-in:
Specific cultural notes the tipping block calls out:
Numbers are 2026 estimates from World Bank GNI data, Numbeo cost-of-living, and traveller-forum consensus. Budget figures shift quickly with currency volatility. Verify in the week before booking, especially for Argentina, Venezuela, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, and Sri Lanka where parallel exchange rates can dramatically change effective costs.
Each country profile carries five essential phrases in the local language: hello, thank you, yes / no, sorry, and help! with the native script and an approximate Latin phonetic. The capitalised letter in each phonetic shows the stressed syllable.
Phrases ship for 26 languages Warnely can verify (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Malay, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew). Multilingual countries (Switzerland, Belgium, South Africa, Singapore, Canada) are skipped on the principle that the wrong primary-language pick is worse than no pick at all. English in those countries gets a traveller reliably understood.
Arabic uses Modern Standard Arabic, broadly understood across the Arabic-speaking world but not the colloquial dialect anywhere. Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi, and Gulf Arabic each have their own local forms. The MSA phrases here will be understood and read as polite or formal. Hindi is shipped for India even though India has 22 scheduled languages. It is the most widely usable single choice but not universal, especially in southern states where English is often a more reliable option.
Phrases are double-checked against multiple sources (Lonely Planet language guides, Omniglot, the relevant Wikipedia language pages). If you see a wrong romanisation or a script error, email us. Phonetic conventions vary and we erred toward the most common English-traveller convention.
Every country profile carries a Quick Facts card: plug type, mains voltage, timezone, driving side, and tap-water safety. These are the things travellers check repeatedly and the answers do not need long-form prose. The card lives in the right-hand panel of the dashboard.
Tap-water classifications are conservative: safe means generally drinkable from public taps in most cities; caution means it varies by region or treatment status (locals often drink it but a sensitive traveller may want bottled or filtered); unsafe means stick to bottled or properly treated water. When in doubt, default to bottled. The cost of being wrong about water is very high.
Every country in the dashboard also has a long-form landing page at /guides/is-<country>-safe. Useful when you want a single page to read or share rather than the interactive dashboard. The pages are generated from the same dataset, so the headline score, breakdown, advisories, and Quick Facts always match. Twelve countries (Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam) have additional hand-written prose; the rest are template-driven.
Spot-check fixes applied across releases after re-verification passes:
Found something else wrong? hello@warnely.com. Corrections from travellers always welcome.
If a country profile is wrong, missing critical context, or out of date, tell us. We would rather hear it from you than learn about it from a traveller's bad day. Email hello@warnely.com with the country and the line you would change.