How we score destinations

Every destination on crowddodger gets a 0–100 saturation score, a weighted composite of four sub-scores.

Components and weights

Crowd Density (40%) — annual visitors ÷ population, plus Airbnb listings per capita where available. Sources: UNWTO, national tourism boards, InsideAirbnb.
Visitor Impact (30%) — annual visitors ÷ city area in km², plus cruise passenger volume for cruise ports. Sources: UNWTO, port authority annual reports.
Local Sentiment (20%) — count of overtourism-related news / protest / restriction items in the past 12 months, normalized. Sources: cited news articles per destination.
Trajectory (10%) — year-over-year change in visitor numbers, OR change in news mention frequency. Often estimated for v1.

Bands

Score	Label
0–24	Plenty of room
25–49	Manageable
50–74	Crowded
75–89	Severely overtouristed
90+	Crisis-level

v1 limitations (and why we publish them)

For Ship 1, sub-scores were researched manually rather than computed from a live data pipeline. Where a sub-score is marked estimated on a destination page, that means we couldn't find a clean public number for it and inferred from a survey of recent news. We display the badge so you can weight it appropriately. The Ship 3 update will replace estimated sub-scores with hard data from an automated re-verify pipeline.

How we verify sources

Every fee, fine, and restriction on this site is backed by a primary source — an official government page, a major news outlet, or (for small-market destinations and Alaska cruise ports) the country's national newspaper of record. We list the exact citation under every fee.

A nightly verification script (scripts/verify_sources.py) hits every source URL with up to three User-Agents in order: our default crowddodger.com/1.0, a current Chrome desktop UA, and Googlebot. If any of the three succeeds (HTTP < 400) we log which UA it took. If all three fail we list the URL on this page so you can see exactly what's verifiable and what isn't.

Source-class allowlist

For a source to count as a fee citation it has to be in one of these classes:

Official tourism boards, port authorities, or government tax/transport authorities — any language. Examples: Comune di Venezia, Agencia Tributaria de Catalunya, Port of Kotor, Bali Government Tourism Office, Ajuntament de Barcelona, Hellenic Ministry of Culture.
Major news outlets — BBC, Reuters, AP, AFP, dpa, Kyodo, Bloomberg, NYT, Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Skift, Travel+Leisure.
National newspaper of record — for countries where major-outlet coverage of small-destination policy is thin: Catalan News (Barcelona), Portugal News (Lisbon), Iceland Review (Reykjavik). Each addition listed here.
Alaska local press — for the small Alaska cruise ports (Juneau, Skagway), national press doesn't cover port-specific fees, so we accept Alaska Public Media (KTOO, KTUU, APM news), Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, and KHNS Skagway.

Saturation sub-scores have a slightly wider allowlist that adds credible travel-industry trade outlets (Travel Tomorrow, PhocusWire, Travel Weekly, Condé Nast Traveler, Lonely Planet news) — but blogs, listicles, content-marketing sites, and TripAdvisor never count, anywhere.

The local_sentiment saturation cite has one extra rule: it must be from 2023 or later, because sentiment shifts. If we can't find a recent enough source, we mark the score as estimated rather than fake precision.

Verification freshness

Every fee row carries a last_verified date. If we haven't re-checked a fee in more than 90 days, the destination page automatically renders a Verification pending badge on that row. Don't trust a stale row without clicking through to the source.

Verification exceptions

A small number of citations resolve correctly in normal web browsers but fail our automated verifier. Most often this is because the cited source is hosted on infrastructure that has a misconfigured TLS certificate chain, or sits behind a Cloudflare WAF that requires JavaScript execution. We don't relax our verifier to make these cases pass — instead we list them here so you can judge for yourself.

URL	Reason	Browser-verified
https://www.machupicchu.gob.pe/online-tickets/?lang=en	Peru government site has incomplete TLS certificate chain (missing intermediate). Modern browsers cache the intermediate from prior visits and load the page; Python httpx and curl without -k fail TLS handshake.	Verified loads in Chrome / Safari / Firefox as of 2026-05-05.

If you spot a citation that's broken — even one we list as a verified exception — email payments@paywire.cloud and we'll get back to you within 24 hours.

How alternates are evidenced

Recommended alternates go through the same source verification as everything else — every URL fetched, every quote matched verbatim against the live page. Their quietness is not taken from third-party claims at all: it is evidenced from crowddodger's own visitor-pressure measurements, and an alternate qualifies as quiet only if it runs well below its paired destination. Alternates recommended for absorption capacity rather than quietness are labelled as such on the destination page.