Method
How we rate a district
Every district on this site gets one of three colours. Here is how we decide, and what the numbers on each district mean.
The three verdicts
- Recommended
- Book here without thinking about it.
- Mixed
- Fine for some travellers, wrong for others.
- Avoid
- Cheap for a reason. Read the cons first.
The colour answers one question: should you stay here? Not whether the district is nice, and not whether it is worth a visit.
Boundaries
We do not draw the districts ourselves
We use each city’s official districts, taken from OpenStreetMap. That matters more than it sounds: a hand-drawn “Gothic Quarter” could be quietly stretched to make a recommendation look better. Official borders cannot, and they never overlap, so every street belongs to exactly one district.
The catch: official districts do not always match how travellers talk about a city. If a city’s official districts are too big or too unfamiliar to be useful, we leave that city out rather than make up our own.
The rules
Three rules every district goes through
- 01
Every warning comes with a source
If we rate a district amber or red, something other than our opinion has to back that up, or the district does not go live: a quote from a traveller or a travel guide, or a number we counted, like how few sights or holiday rentals it has compared with the rest of the city. A number only counts if it really is worse than the city average. The less flattering we are, the less we rely on our own word.
The downsides of a district are written before its good sides, and almost every district has some. We do not invent a complaint for a district that genuinely has none, though.
- 02
Safety gets its own note
Safety is not part of the colour. A district can be a poor place to stay because it is far out and dull, or because of trouble on the streets late at night, and one red badge would not tell you which. So the colour answers “should you stay here” and a separate note answers “what should you know about walking back at 2am”.
A safety warning always says what the problem is. A warning you cannot act on is worse than no warning.
- 03
Quotes are copied, never written
Every traveller quote is copied word for word from Wikivoyage, Wikipedia, Travel Stack Exchange or the UK Foreign Office, with a link to the original. When a quote was written in another language, we show our translation and say so. Each one is checked against the original text before a city goes live, and if a single quote does not match, the city does not go live.
We do not use Booking.com, TripAdvisor or Google reviews. Those reviews belong to the people who wrote them, and they are about single hotels rather than whole districts.
The numbers
What the numbers mean
- Walking minutes to the centre
- Measured from the district to one landmark, named on each city page.
- Compare districts within a city, not between cities.
- Price level
- How expensive the district is compared with the rest of that city, from one to four symbols.
- Cheap in Oslo is not cheap in Naples.
- Transport lines
- Metro and tram only.
- Buses are left out: the data is patchy, and a half-complete bus map is worse than none.
Worth knowing
- We have not stayed in every district
- Each verdict is put together from travel guides, first-hand accounts, transport maps and prices, then checked by a person before the city goes live.
- Nobody can pay for a better colour
- Not a hotel, not a tourist board, not a city. No district is placed or ordered by anything but its verdict.
- We do not recommend individual hotels
- We tell you which district. Which hotel is up to you.
Think we got one wrong?
Locals know best
A district can change in a year. If a colour here does not match what you know, tell us. The about page has the address, and every city we have rated is on the front page.