How we rate destinations
Vardekort is a travel safety intelligence product. It is decision support, not advice — a clearer starting point for your own judgment about a place.
A. What we measure
For every destination we look at four things in combination: governance quality, development level, interpersonal violence exposure, and official travel guidance from authoritative international bodies.
We aggregate and normalize public indicators across multiple international sources — we do not create primary data. Where we have to choose between conflicting signals, the choice is documented in this methodology rather than hidden inside the pipeline.
B. The two scores
Safety (0–25)
Structural risk, built from long-run indicators plus current official guidance. Official guidance can cap the Safety score regardless of structural strength: a country with strong institutions that currently carries a do-not-travel notice is rated accordingly.
AI Score (0–25)
Forward-looking signals — civil unrest, weather, recent advisory movement, short-window events. Designed to pick up changes that the structural score cannot react to in time.
Plain language: strong institutions can still score low on AI Score if a near-term disruption is active. The two scores exist precisely because a country's long-run profile and its current conditions do not always tell the same story.
C. How values become points
Each indicator is banded against multi-year global distributions, not single-year snapshots. This smooths out one-off data releases and keeps the score meaningful when one country's annual update lands before another's.
Weights and band thresholds are versioned. Changes go through a change log so you can tell, at any point, why a score looks the way it does.
D. Data freshness and coverage
Vardekort covers every country in the world — 197 sovereign states plus 23 territories and autonomous regions.
Refresh cadence differs by indicator:
- Structural indicators — annually.
- Interpersonal violence exposure — monthly.
- Official guidance and current conditions — continuously.
Where an underlying indicator is stale beyond our freshness window, the affected sub-score is marked insufficient data and excluded from the headline. We would rather say "we do not know" than hide the gap behind a confident-looking number.
E. Uncertainty
Scores reflect available data at publication. Conditions can change faster than any dataset, and any single indicator can carry measurement error. Treat the score as a reasoned starting point, not a verdict.
F. What we do not do
- Vardekort is not a prediction.
- Vardekort is not personalised risk — your circumstances matter more than any global score.
- Vardekort is not a substitute for official entry requirements.
- Vardekort is not medical, legal, insurance, or security advice.
G. Governance
Reviewed by Haakon Skramstad, Founding Editor.
- Version
- v1.0
- Published
- Next review
A versioned methodology change log is maintained; links to the diff for each revision land here alongside the version bump.