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.