Three ways WayAway helps keep travelers safe

Travel can be life-giving: going to a different city means waking up under a new sky, free of your old routines.

But it's hard to give yourself over to the magic if you spend your whole trip worrying about safety.

These worries can weigh especially heavily on women. In a recent poll of female WayAway users, 24% of respondents said they'd canceled a trip over safety concerns, and our users constantly ask us about the safety of areas they're visiting.

Fortunately, there's a way to minimize risks and increase your confidence when traveling: get informed. Learn about your destination's safety profile before planning your itinerary, and you'll be both safer and more comfortable on your trip.

To make this process easier, we've added several safety features to our WayAway city guides. Read on to learn more!  

• A word of caution
• Feature #1: the 30 safest destinations for solo female travelers
• Feature #2: greyed-out areas on the map
• Feature #3: safety alerts
• But remember… you're still going to have fun!
• Feedback
• Further reading

A word of caution

Discussing safety is a very tricky issue. Unfortunately, the question "Is this area safe to visit?" rarely has a 100% clear-cut answer — it depends on whom you ask. Here are some factors that make this difficult:

• Every traveler's risk tolerance is different. One person might be worried about leaving the resort, while their sister might witness a revolution and not bat an eyelid.
• Perceptions of safety can, unfortunately, be colored by class and race, and it can be difficult to tell where facts end and prejudice begins.
• When characterizing a neighborhood as unsafe, we can't forget that it's home to real people. We need to do our best to respect them and not unjustifiably drive customers away from their businesses.

Our safety recommendations are just that — recommendations — though ones based on local expertise. We encourage users to see them not as the final word, but as a starting point for further research.

With these caveats in mind, let's move on to WayAway's safety features.

Feature #1: the 30 safest destinations for solo female travelers

Recently, WayAway produced a ranking of the 30 safest destinations for solo female travelers.

We took the 150+ cities featured in WayAway's "In a Nutshell" travel guides and looked at:

• Independent assessments such as
  • The Economist's Safe Cities Index;
  • The Economist Intelligence Unit Global Liveability Index;
  • Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection's World's Safest Cities;
  • Resonance Consultancy's World's Best Cities.
• The latest safety data from the Numbeo Crime Index and Travel Safe - Abroad. 
• Interviews with local experts who helped to write WayAway's travel guides.
  
  Here's how our list turned out:

1	Reykjavik	11	San Diego	21	Seattle
2	San Juan	12	London	22	Orlando
3	Budapest	13	Honolulu	23	Houston
4	Singapore	14	Tokyo	24	New York
5	Madrid	15	Hong Kong	25	Los Angeles
6	Toronto	16	Vienna	26	Chicago
7	Boston	17	Doha	27	San Francisco
8	Munich	18	Barcelona	28	Kuala Lumpur
9	Dublin	19	Washington, DC	29	Prague
10	Berlin	20	Amsterdam	30	Las Vegas

There's general consensus that these cities have minimal risks for the typical female visitor. For a first-time solo traveler, they're great choices!

If you find yourself searching for tickets to one of these cities in the WayAway app or on wayaway.io, you'll see this badge of glory.

Feature #2: greyed-out areas on the map

Each city guide includes a map highlighting different neighborhoods and describing the vibe of each. Some maps also feature greyed-out areas that are potentially unsafe for visitors, such as this one in São Paulo.

In most cases, these are places that our local experts advise tourists to avoid, even during the daytime. In deciding whether to include them on our map, we also look at violent crime statistics and see what other locals are saying about the area. 

Our criteria are fairly strict: we don't grey out neighborhoods that are far from all the other places we feature, and if the area is generally considered safe to visit by day, we don't mark it.

Feature #3: safety alerts

Sometimes we recommend a place to users but let them know about a safety concern. One example is the Garfield Park Observatory in Chicago — a highly rated attraction in a neighborhood where locals say caution is justified. Here's how we mark it.

We can't leave great spots like the conservatory out of our guide to Chicago, but we'd be remiss to send users there without a heads-up on potential risks.

But remember… you're still going to have fun!

This stuff isn't exactly the exciting side of traveling: people post pictures of themselves drinking margaritas on foreign rooftops, not squinting at their phones, reading up on crime rates.

But with WayAway's help, you can get the unglamorous part out of the way and enjoy a safer, more relaxed trip. 

Feedback

Do you disagree with the safety advice you see in our city guides? Because we know how tricky this is, we're also always trying to improve. Please write us at guides@wayaway.io to let us know.

Further reading

For advice and ideas from a solo female traveler, see this article.