About City Travel Stats
City Travel Stats is an independent research project that gathers travel-safety statistics for cities around the world and presents every figure with the full documentation trail behind it — the source, the year the data describes, the exact geographic area, and how it was counted. The goal is simple: help travellers judge how safe a place is using numbers they can actually check.
Why this project exists
Travel-safety numbers are everywhere and most of them are impossible to trust. A crime rate quoted with no year attached, a “most dangerous cities” ranking that never says what it counted, a figure for a whole metro area presented as if it were the city centre — these mislead far more than they inform. Two cities can look wildly different only because one reports crime for its narrow municipal boundary and the other for a sprawling region, or because the figures come from years apart.
City Travel Stats was built to fix that. We collect figures only from primary and official sources, store the precise context around each one, and make every number drillable: on any figure you can open “what’s behind this number” and see the source, the reference year, the exact geographic unit, the definition used, and the collection method. Where credible sources disagree, we show the disagreement instead of quietly picking a winner.
Who builds it
City Travel Stats is an independent project built and maintained by Gregory Terlecki. It is not affiliated with any government, tourism board, security company, or travel brand, and it takes no sponsorship or payment in exchange for how a city is presented. That independence is the point — the data has to answer to its sources, not to anyone with a stake in how a place looks.
Because the project is independent and small, transparency is our substitute for a big institutional name: rather than asking you to trust us, we show our work on every figure. If a number can’t be traced back to a retrievable source, it doesn’t get published as a confident value.
How we source the data
We work top-down through a source hierarchy — primary government statistical agencies and police departments first, then intergovernmental bodies such as UNODC, then rigorous academic and NGO sources — and only fall to a lower tier when a higher one doesn’t cover a place or metric. We deliberately exclude travel blogs, real-estate sites, security-company marketing, and news articles that don’t cite a primary source. The full approach, including how we handle conflicting sources and the pitfalls of comparing cities, is documented on our methodology page.
What this site is — and isn’t
This is a research and reference tool, not safety advice for a specific trip. Statistics describe the past behaviour of large populations; they can’t tell you what will happen to you on a particular street on a particular night. For decisions about a specific journey, always consult your own government’s official travel advisory and local authorities. We surface official advisory levels where they exist, but we are not a substitute for them.
How it’s funded
City Travel Stats is free to use. To cover the cost of building and hosting it, the site displays third-party advertising. Advertising never influences which figures we show or how a city is presented — the data pipeline and the ads are entirely separate. How advertising and cookies work is described in our privacy policy.
Get in touch
Spotted a figure that looks wrong, or want a city added? Those are the most useful things you can send us — corrections and requests directly improve the dataset. Use the feedback form to file a request or report a problem, or see the contact page for how to reach us directly.
In short: an independent, ad-supported project that would rather show you a documented, checkable number — or an honest “we don’t know yet” — than a confident figure you can’t verify.