About crowddodger

crowddodger is a small editorial project tracking overtourism at the world's most-visited destinations. We publish a saturation score from 0 to 100 for each place we cover, alongside the visitor fees, taxes, and restrictions that affect anyone planning to go.

The score isn't a verdict. It's a snapshot — a way to tell, at a glance, whether a destination is having a quiet shoulder season or a crisis-level summer. Five bands describe what the number means: plenty of room, manageable, crowded, severely overtouristed, and crisis-level.

How the score works

Each destination is rated across four components, weighted as follows:

• Crowd density (40%) — visitor concentration relative to local capacity
• Visitor impact (30%) — strain on housing, infrastructure, and environment
• Local sentiment (20%) — how residents talk about tourism in their own city, sourced from 2023 onward
• Trajectory (10%) — which direction the situation is moving

The four roll up into a composite. The composite is what's shown on the map and the homepage.

Editorial standards

Every fee, restriction, and saturation citation on this site is verified against the published source before it goes live. We don't cite travel blogs, listicles, or content marketing. We cite official government and municipal sources, major international news organizations (Reuters, AP, AFP, Bloomberg, BBC, Guardian, NYT, WSJ, FT), and a small number of vetted travel trade outlets (Skift, Travel Tomorrow, PhocusWire) for saturation context.

When a primary source is intermittently available — as has occasionally been the case with national government sites — we document the substitution publicly in our methodology.

Each piece of data on the site carries a staleness indicator. When verification ages past 90 days, the badge shifts color. Nothing is ever quietly stale.

The full methodology, including the verification protocol and a list of every source URL behind every fee on the site, is published at /methodology.

What crowddodger is not

We are not a booking site. We do not earn commissions on travel. We do not publish "best places to visit" lists. We do not have a recommendation algorithm.

We publish data, citations, and a way to read both.

Contact

Press, partnerships, correspondent enquiries: nolines@crowddodger.com.

crowddodger is an independent editorial project.