The number between 0 (zero) and 5 (five) that we show, represent how dangerous a country is.
Or better, what level of danger different authorities see for their citizens when travelling a specific country. Often governments publish some sort of advisory for travel destinations for their own citizens. As different countries may have a different view on the risks or use different scales, we try to provide a normalized "One-Glance-Overview".
We collect all these individual advisories and try to analyze the risk described. We then give each advisory a risk rating between zero and five. The number shown on travel-advisory.info is the average score that we got over all advisories from all sources.
Results between zero and two usually indicate safe travelling. When heading to four and upwards, you should seriously reconsider your need to travel or not travel at all.
Since this is done automatically, the actual degree of danger in a specific location can deviate from the value shown. Sometimes a single advisory may be too positive or too negative. However, as we use eleven sources at the moment, the risk level shown should still be a useful inddicator for your travel planning.
If you consider travelling a given country, please visit the sources of the advisories for further reading. They should be a good starting point for additional research of your own.
There are many influencing factors on the reliability of the rating for a country.
One aspect can be political agenda of the issueing country. Or sometimes citizens of a specific country are at threat when visiting specific other countries. This can often explain a strong deviance in rating by a single source.
Another issue is time and delay. Unless there are quickly rising threats, governments need some days (or weeks and months) to react officially to a new situation. Once published, we capture these advisories within a day.
Also, sometimes it is hard to identify local problems. So a country could be given a higher or lower rating than would be adequate. Large countries with intense but very local conflicts could be given a rather high value (e.g. Russian Federation). Also a country that is indicated as safe, could have local conflicts that are not covered. For some sources we could extract local information. It is featured underneath the national advise.
Also note: there is no international standard for describing travel risks that would be easy to pick up by an algorithm. Also different source countries use different scales. Some differentiate between two or three warning levels, some have four or even up to six. So the rating shown on this website may not 100% represent the intention of the original advisory (though it should be somewhat close).
Sometimes governments change the way this information can be aggregated. In this case, we may show fewer sources for a given advisory. The most sources we can currently show is eleven. If it's less than this for a given country, it usually means: not all issuing countries think a warning is required.
Due to the nature of the data - being of various origins - some disputed territories could be ignored, misslabeled or combined. This is not taking side on any political view but a technical reason.
The information on Travel-Advisory.info is updated in the morning each day. This update includes all sources and their advisories for all countries. So each morning there is a fresh assessment and the data shown on this webseite represents the current official statements. Not always do we see change. The world is slow so changes usually only happen every now and then.
Yes, please do so. Just not by scraping though. Please consider using our free resources for webmasters through our Data API and our Website Widgets. Just put some attribution somewhere and you are good to do whatever you want.
If you want all the details, there is a paid API that offers all the details for an affordable price.
Or you can subscribe to the RSS at https://www.travel-advisory.info/rss.
We currently use data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. This data is updated every morning at around 8:30 am CET.
The Covid-19 information displayed is not calculated into the risk score shown on this website. The scenarios are different in different countries. We try not to interpret the data but provide a neutral view on the situation.
We aggregate the official travel advisories from the following countries.