Editorial standards

How the scores are made

Every city gets a Snack Score from six factors scored 0 to 10: sights in a day (30%), food (15%), after dark (10%), how compact the 24-hour route is (15%), how fast the airport ride is (15%) and the cost of one night (15%). A city whose own page gives a conditional verdict loses 0.3 points, and one that needs two nights loses 0.8. Layover hubs get a separate Layover Score. One program reads the same inputs for every city and hub and sorts every list from the result. Writers explain the order; they cannot change it. How we score cities sets out every formula.

How prices are checked

• Hotels: on Kayak, the cheapest double room in a hotel rated 3 stars or better with a guest rating of 8/10 or better, in the city's central area, for one night, two adults, on Friday, January 15, 2027 and Friday, June 11, 2027, taxes and fees in, checked October 21, 2026. Where Kayak would not load, we used Google Hotels or Booking.com, and the page says which. We never estimate a room price.
• Airport rides: the fastest scheduled public transport from the main terminal to the center, with the minutes from the operator's own timetable or journey planner and the standard adult single fare. Taxi fares appear only where a fixed fare or an official estimate is published.
• Day tickets and entries: the operator's own fare page and each attraction's official ticket page, for an adult.
• Currency: every price shows US dollars first, pounds in parentheses and the local money after a semicolon, for example $15.70 (£11.80; €14). All conversions use one rate table for the whole site, the European Central Bank reference rates of October 20, 2026, with the Qatari riyal and UAE dirham at their fixed dollar pegs. Nobody converts a price by hand.

Where the other numbers come from

• Routes: each stop's coordinates from its Wikipedia article, or OpenStreetMap where none exists, and the route length computed from them.
• Flights and trains: the US and UK hub airports with a scheduled nonstop, from the destination airport's route map or its published airlines and destinations table; train times from National Rail, Eurostar, Amtrak or the operator's journey planner.
• Entry rules: what a US or UK passport holder needs, from the government's own pages; travel advisories from travel.state.gov.
• Climate: the Open-Meteo historical archive, 2016 to 2025. Every city page renders its 12-month table from that dataset, so the prose describes seasons in words and never retypes a figure that could drift.

Every page lists its sources at the foot, with a note on what each one confirms and the date it was checked.

The editors' scores

Sights, food and after dark are judgments, so they use one published scale for every city, and each score is printed with a one-sentence reason naming the places behind it. They move when the city does: a closure or a long renovation lowers the sights score until it reopens.

What we do when a number is not published

We say so. We do not estimate a fare, a room price, a journey time or an opening hour, and we do not present a guess as a fact. A missing factor is left out of the score and the other weights are scaled up.

Operator claims

We report what is true, not what a listing says. Claims about queues, skip-the-line access, journey times or what a pass includes are the operator's until an official source confirms them, and our pages say whose claim it is.

Photographs and illustrations

Every photograph of a place is a real photograph from Wikimedia Commons, credited on the privacy page. Byline portraits and some illustrative scenes, such as tour cards and some page headers, are generated; they never show a real place, and the credits list each one.