How we calibrate budgets + stats

Who writes this & how

MapSorted is written and maintained by Anthony, its founder — one person, not a content farm. The work splits into three layers, and they don't carry the same weight of first-hand experience, so it's worth being clear about which is which:

• Postcardsare first-hand trip reports — places I've actually been, with my own photos and a date. When a guide has a matching postcard, it links to it. These are the least templated, most personal thing on the site. Read the postcards to judge the voice for yourself.
• Comparison pagesthat we keep indexed are hand-written — every published "X or Y" page has an editor-written verdict and 250–300 words of prose reasoning, not a filled-in template. Pairs we haven't written up don't get published.
• Destination guides are researched with AI assistance, then human-calibrated against the documented rules on this page — budget tiers, stat scales, and best-time windows are all editorial judgements, cross-checked and corrected over time rather than pulled unedited from a model.

Update cadence:guides carry a visible "Updated" date sourced from the same field that drives the sitemap, so it only moves when the content actually changed. A standing freshness review runs twice a month to keep budgets, prices, and that date honest.

Corrections:if a number or a claim looks wrong for a place you know well, that's genuinely useful — flag it and it gets looked at in the next pass. The whole point of documenting the rules below is so you can push back on any specific figure.

The three tiers

Every guide shows three daily totals: Backpacker (🎒), Mid-range (🧳), and Luxury (💎). The same labels cover four per-day categories in the cost calculator (stay, food, transit, activities), so you can mix and match — e.g. pay for a nicer room but eat where locals eat.

🎒 Backpacker — what it buys you

• Stay: hostel dorm bed or a basic guesthouse / cheapest 2-star room. Shared bathrooms are likely.
• Food: street food, markets, self-catering from supermarkets, one sit-down meal a day at most.
• Transit: buses, the metro, overnight trains. Walking when it's faster. No taxis.
• Activities: free or cheap — public parks, free museum days, self-guided walks, one paid attraction every few days.

🧳 Mid-range — what it buys you

• Stay: 3-star hotel or a well-reviewed Airbnb / private room. Consistent, comfortable, nothing fancy.
• Food: neighborhood restaurants, a mix of casual and one nicer dinner. Coffee-shop breakfasts.
• Transit: transit cards, occasional rideshare, airport express. A rental car for natural / island destinations.
• Activities: 1–2 paid attractions per day, a guided day tour every few days, one splurge experience.

💎 Luxury — what it buys you

• Stay: 4- or 5-star hotel, boutique resort, or top-tier rental. Often in a prime-location district.
• Food: fine-dining dinners, tasting menus where they exist, high-end cocktail bars, hotel breakfast.
• Transit: taxis or private car door-to-door, premium train classes, no bus commitments.
• Activities: private guides, premium experiences (hot-air balloon, Michelin-adjacent cooking class, helicopter tours where they exist).

Daily-budget $/day numbers

Each destination has a hand-calibrated triple — e.g. Bangkok is { budget: 25, mid_range: 60, luxury: 180 }. These aren't pulled from a single API; they're editorial judgements cross-checked against:

• current hotel prices at the tier implied above, sampled in shoulder season, averaged across 3–5 neighbourhoods
• typical food costs from the guide's own Typical Costs table (street meal, mid-range dinner, wine glass, coffee)
• regional transit passes / rideshare averages where the data's reliable
• for safari / remote island / polar destinations, the all-inclusive package price divided by daily nights

The cost_index(a 1–100 number you'll see in some charts) is a separate abstract measure of overall cost of living. It usually tracks mid_range $/day closely, but diverges when a destination has unusual structure — e.g. Botswana's Okavango Delta sits at cost_index 90 but real mid-range $/day is $800 because of all-inclusive safari lodge pricing. In that case, trust the dollar number.

How the split is allocated

Inside each tier's daily total, we split spending across four buckets: stay / food / transit / activities. The base split is roughly 42 / 25 / 15 / 18, then shifts per destination:

• Expensive cities skew more toward accommodation (Tokyo, Paris, London).
• Walkable cities need less transit budget, more activity budget.
• Cheap-food destinations with standout food scenes (Bangkok, Oaxaca, Hanoi, Penang) bump food share.
• National parks and islands bump activities + transit (tours, transfers, rental gear), trim food + stay.
• Multi-stop regions/countries bump transit (intercity movement).

That gives each destination a distinctive stack — a Paris day tilts toward stay, a Bangkok day toward food, a Banff day toward activities — rather than every city showing the same pie chart.

FIFA-style stat cards

Each destination page shows a stat card with up to 9 attributes on a 30–99 scale: safety, affordability, food, culture, nightlife, walkability, nature, connectivity, transit. These are not votes or survey scores — they're derived from the same underlying data that drives comparisons and badges.

• Safety maps the destination's safety index (1–100) directly; the floor is 35.
• Food, culture, nightlife, walkability, transit, connectivity, and natureeach come from a per-attribute 1–5 editorial scale, mapped onto a universal 30–99 band: 1 → 44, 2 → 58, 3 → 72, 4 → 86, 5 → 99. Culture gets a small bonus based on the number of curated attractions in a guide — destinations with a deep attraction list earn up to +10 points. Nature gets a +8 boost for destinations typed as "natural" (national parks, fjords, wilderness regions) and +6 for islands. Most destinations land in the 55–85 band.
• Naturescores are uncapped — they reflect the raw 1–5 editorial rating on the same 30–99 scale as every other attribute. National parks, fjords, and other "natural" type destinations get a +8 point boost, and islands get +6, reflecting that nature access is their core draw. A city rated 3/5 for nature lands at 72; a national park rated 5/5 lands at 99.
• Overall is a weighted composite. For cities, towns, and islands, all 9 attributes contribute: safety 16%, culture 15%, food 14%, nature 13%, walkability 11%, transit 10%, affordability 9%, nightlife 7%, connectivity 5%.
• For nature and region destinations(fjords, national parks, wilderness areas), nightlife, walkability, and transit are excluded — they don't meaningfully apply to a fjord or a national park. The remaining 6 attributes are reweighted proportionally: safety 22.2%, culture 20.8%, food 19.4%, nature 18.1%, affordability 12.5%, connectivity 6.9%. This prevents world-class nature destinations from being dragged down by irrelevant low nightlife or transit scores.
• When a playstyle is active, custom weights override both defaults.

Seasonal modifiers

Stat cards shift with the calendar. Each month, attributes like walkability, nature, culture, and affordability receive small modifiers (roughly ±3 to ±10 points) based on the destination's best months, estimated temperature, and seasonal patterns. During peak season, culture and food scores nudge upward (festivals, full restaurant scenes); in extreme heat or cold, walkability drops; off-season months get a small affordability bump.

The stat card shows these shifts with small up/down arrows next to each score, plus a season pill (Peak, Shoulder, or Off-Season) in the header. The Overall score always uses base values — seasonal arrows are informational context, not baked into the composite.

Type-aware stat cards

Not every destination is a city. For national parks, fjords, and wilderness regions (typed as "natural" or "region"), the stat card drops three attributes that don't apply — nightlife, walkability, and transit — showing 6 stats instead of 9. The subtitle changes from "9-stat city rating" to "6-stat nature rating" or "6-stat region rating." Islands show all 9 stats with an "island rating" label.

This means destinations like the Norwegian Fjords, Swiss Alps, Banff, or Patagonia show a cleaner card focused on what actually matters there: safety, affordability, food, culture, nature, and connectivity.

Affordability score

Affordability is derived from the destination's cost_index — an abstract 1–100 measure of overall cost of living, where 1 is cheapest and 100 is most expensive. The formula inverts the index: affordability = 115 − cost_index, clamped to the 30–99 range. So a cost_index of 20 (very cheap — Hanoi, Yogyakarta) yields an affordability score of 95, while a cost_index of 85 (very expensive — Maldives, Bora Bora) yields 30.

The cost_index usually tracks mid-range $/day closely, but they can diverge for destinations with unusual pricing structures — e.g. all-inclusive safari lodges where the daily rate is very high but the cost_index reflects the regional economy more broadly.

What these numbers aren't

• They aren't forecasts. Prices move — currency shifts, seasonal spikes, new taxes. Use mid-range $/day as a planning anchor, not a booking guarantee. The cost calculator lets you mix tiers per category, which is closer to how most people actually travel.
• They assume shoulder season. Peak-season hotels can run 2–3× the mid-range number in cities like Reykjavik, Santorini, or Kyoto during cherry blossom.
• They assume two travelers sharing a room. The cost calculator adjusts for solo / three+ automatically using one room per pair.
• The FIFA stats are editorial calibration, not crowd data.They're designed so the top of each category feels defensible to someone who's been there. If a score looks wrong to you, that's useful feedback — tell us and we'll look at it.