I’ve been using TripIt to keep my travel reservations organized for as long as I can remember. Over time, the website/app has continuously added extra features to its base service and introduced TripIt Pro. One of the more recent additions was from 2018 when TripIt started showing neighborhood safety scores.
The scores are a combination of several metrics which currently include:
- Physical harm: including muggings, drug activity, gang prevalence, and police presence
- Women’s safety: including verbal harassment, physical assault, violence directed against women, and adequacy of women’s support facilities
- LGBTQ: including the likelihood of harm or discrimination against LGBTQ persons or groups and level of caution required
- Health and medical: including environmental pollution and contamination, illnesses, regulation of sanitary conditions, and access to medical care
- Political freedoms: including political unrest, limited political rights, and incidences of riots and protests
- Theft: including petty theft, pickpocketing, burglaries, auto theft, and grand theft
To give a better estimate of the health and medical safety of a neighborhood in 2020, it’s necessary to take the COVID-19 risk into account. GeoSure has partnered with TripIt to compute the neighborhood safety rankings. GeoSure’s CEO Michael Becker shared how the company is using current data to continually update the rankings.
Health & Medical Safety scores are derived from a combination of well-known resources including, but not limited to: Johns Hopkins University, CDC, WHO, local health agencies and response/recovery organizations. Additionally, large volumes of unstructured signals are analyzed, (such as local sentiment), along with certain less-traditional predictor variables of spread, (such as the velocity and “viscosity” of migration/travel). As a data science and risk modeling platform, GeoSure’s expertise is in taking tens of thousands of disparate variables and making them more accessible, understandable, and consumable for travelers.
I checked out the current rankings for some cities in the U.S. that we’ve visited as well as a few international locations.
New Orleans, LA
New Braunfels/Austin TX
West Palm Beach, FL
Phoenix, AZ
It was interesting to see that New Orleans, considered to be one of the first hotspots, is now showing the lowest risk of places that I looked at. States with hot spots like Texas, Florida, and Arizona are all in the high risk or even the highest risk categories. Phoenix gets a risk score of 92/100.
How do international cities compare?
London
Hakone, Japan
Even though Japan and the United Kingdom are opening up their borders, but not to Americans, their risk numbers are not much lower than ours. I’d take that to mean that there isn’t a risk-free place to travel right now. Everywhere you go will require you to take extra precautions to keep yourself safe and healthy.
The one negative about the TripIt neighborhood safety function is that it only works with itineraries in your account. I was able to get these rankings by looking at our past trips. There’s no way to check out the rating for a future booking. I guess you could enter a dummy reservation and then look but that’s extra work.
#stayhealthy #staysafe #washyourhands #wearamask
Like this post? Please share it! We have plenty more just like it and would love it if you decided to hang around and get emailed notifications of when we post. Or maybe you’d like to join our Facebook group – we have 14,000+ members and we talk and ask questions about travel (including Disney parks), creative ways to earn frequent flyer miles and hotel points, how to save money on or for your trips, get access to travel articles you may not see otherwise, etc. Whether you’ve read our posts before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!
This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.