This page explains how I calculate scores, where the data comes from, and — just as importantly — what the scores do not tell you. I think you deserve to know exactly how this works before you use it to make decisions.
I compare destinations to where you live, not to an ideal
Many tools score countries against a perfect standard. I don't think that's honest, because no country is perfect, not even yours. Instead, Fair Away compares every destination to your own home country.
This means the scores you see are always relative. A score of −2.0 next to Italy (if you're Dutch) means Italy scores 2 points lower than the Netherlands on the topics you care about. It does not mean Italy is "bad", it means there's a gap compared to what you're used to at home.
If you're from the Netherlands and you choose "LGBTQ+ rights" as very important, Italy will show a negative score, because the Netherlands scores significantly higher on LGBTQ+ rights. But if you're from Poland and set the same preference, Italy scores better than your home country on that dimension. Same country, different comparison.
Five topics. Five independent organisations.
I do not make up scores. Every number in Fair Away comes from a published report by an independent research organisation. These organisations collect data every year, visit countries, talk to experts and read thousands of reports. I use their results and convert them to a scale of 0 to 10.
You decide what matters most
On the home screen, you set sliders for each topic, from "not important" to "very important." These sliders change how much each topic counts toward a country's overall score.
If you set LGBTQ+ rights to "very important" and democracy to "not important", then LGBTQ+ scores count for much more in the final result.
Two honest caveats on how far that goes. First, the five topics don't naturally vary by the same amount from country to country — LGBTQ+ rights and democracy swing widely across the destinations we cover, while women's formal legal rights vary less. Left alone, that would quietly hand LGBTQ+ and democracy more real influence than the other sliders even when you rate them equally. So behind the scenes, each topic is rescaled to a comparable spread before your weights are applied — the bars and numbers you see on every page stay exactly the sourced figures, only the internal blend that decides sort order and colour is adjusted. That's a deliberate choice about how to combine five different rulers into one comparison, not a published number, and we've tried to say so plainly rather than let it pass as more objective than it is. Second, the five topics tend to move together in the real world — a country strong on rule of law is usually strong on democracy too — so your sliders adjust the picture at the margin more than they completely reorder it.
There is no right or wrong setting. It depends on what matters to you as a traveller.
What do the colours mean?
Each country card has a coloured badge naming how it compares to your home country. We show a label ("slightly lower"), not a decimal — the underlying gap is a difference between two blended composites, so a number like "−0.7" would claim more precision than five different indices, some of them proxies, can actually support. Hover the badge if you want the raw number behind the label. Here's how to read the labels:
The thin dark line on each bar shows where your home country sits. That lets you compare at a glance — even within a single topic.
Why some values show "no data"
On a number of countries — including, probably, your own — you will see No data instead of a score for the prevention of child labour. That is deliberate, and worth two minutes of explanation.
The figure comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour. It is a serious piece of work, but it only covers the 131 countries that hold trade preferences with the United States. Most of Europe, along with Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore and the United States itself, is never assessed. The obvious alternative doesn't close the gap: the ILO and UNICEF's global estimates are built on household surveys in 107 countries and leave out Europe and Northern America entirely, in their own words "because of data limitations". Wealthy countries largely do not run the surveys that would measure this about themselves.
I could fill that hole with a number of my own. It would look precise and it would come from nowhere. Instead, each country page carries a short section explaining what is and isn't known, because an honest blank is worth more than a confident guess.
Two things follow. A blank is not a zero: the ILO's regional estimate still puts roughly 2.3 million children in child labour across Europe and Northern America. And where a value is missing on one side of a comparison, we compare the countries on the values they both have and say so, rather than quietly comparing four numbers against five.
If you think a country ought to be able to answer this question about itself, that is a fair thing to take up with national statistics offices — it is not a gap the travel industry can fill.
What Fair Away does not tell you
Scores are useful — but they have limits. Here's what I think you should know:
Scores are country averages, not city averages. A country might score poorly overall but have one city that is very welcoming. Italy scores low on LGBTQ+ rights — but Milan and Bologna have very active and open queer communities. The country page tries to explain these differences, but a score alone can't show this.
Data is updated once a year. A lot can change in 12 months. I note the year of each data source. If something major has happened recently in a country — a new government, a new law — check the news before you travel.
Laws and reality are not the same thing. A country can have a good law on paper but enforce it badly. Another country might have no specific law but still be welcoming in practice. I always try to explain this gap on the country page under "For travellers."
I cover 46 countries (for now), not the whole world. I focus on the most popular travel destinations. If the country you're looking for isn't listed yet, it means I haven't added it yet, not that it's problem-free.
A missing country is not a free pass — and a "~" means an estimate. Sometimes a country isn't on the main index for a topic. I don't drop it, because leaving a country out would quietly suggest there's nothing to see. Instead I use a second trusted source and carefully match it to the main scale, so the numbers stay comparable. When a score is estimated this way, I mark it with a ~ and explain exactly where it comes from in that country's Sources.
A low score is not a reason to cancel your trip. Fair Away is not a boycott tool. It's an information tool. My goal is that you travel with your eyes open and, where possible, in a way that supports local people and communities rather than just governments.
All five data sources come from Western institutions. EIU is part of The Economist, WEF is the Davos organisation. This is a known limitation — these indices may reflect Western priorities. The relative comparison (vs. your home country) reduces some of this bias, but it doesn't eliminate it. I use these sources because they are independent, rigorous and publicly verifiable. Better alternatives for global comparison don't yet exist.
Who made this — and why
While reading Rosan Smits' Dit is fascisme (De Correspondent, 2025), I came across examples from a popular holiday destination that made something click: most Dutch travellers probably have no idea what's actually going on in some of these countries, on several fronts. That's where the idea for Fair Away started.
But I didn't want to build another tool that wags a finger and tells people which countries they're no longer "allowed" to visit. A lot of people already feel like more and more is being taken away from them — whether that's fully justified or not, the feeling is real. So I wanted to build this from a positive angle: something that shows what you can do, with your visit and your budget, to support the good things in a country instead of just its government's tourism revenue.
So next to a bit of awareness, Fair Away is mainly meant as encouragement: go with your eyes open, and use your own small contribution — spending, choices, attention — to make a bit of a difference. Every bit helps.
This project would have stayed an idea if I hadn't been able to build large parts of it with AI. I want to be transparent about that too: AI helped turn this concept into a working website.
Fair Away is an independent project. I'm not funded by tourism boards, governments or airlines, and I have no financial interest in whether you go to a particular country or not. All data sources I use are publicly available and free to check — I link to all of them directly, so you can always go and look at the original numbers yourself.
Fair Away is a work in progress. I add countries, update data and improve the guidance texts regularly. If you see something that's wrong or outdated, I want to know.
You're free to share this — with credit, not for profit
The words on Fair Away — the guidance texts, the country pages, these explanations — are published under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 licence ↗. You're welcome to copy, quote, translate or build on them, as long as you credit Fair Away with a link back and don't use them commercially. If you'd like to use something commercially, just ask me — I'm usually happy to say yes.
One thing that licence can't cover: the underlying index scores. Those belong to the organisations that publish them — ILGA, EIU, WEF, WJP, ILO and the US Department of Labor — each with their own terms of use. I link to every source so you can always go to the original.
The flags come from flag-icons ↗, an open-source, community-maintained set published under the MIT licence. I don't draw flags myself — a flag is a country's own symbol, and getting the proportions, colours or emblems slightly wrong is disrespectful even when unintentional. Using a set that many people check and correct is safer than trusting my own hand.
The photographs come from Unsplash ↗, where photographers publish under a licence that allows free use. That licence doesn't require credit — but the pictures are their work, so if you want to know who took one, just ask me and I'll tell you.
The small locator globes on country pages are drawn from world-atlas ↗ (ISC licence, TopoJSON built from Natural Earth ↗, which is public domain). They show coastlines only — no political borders — because this site already treats several borders as contested (Taiwan, Western Sahara and others each get their own page), and a country's own shape isn't the kind of political line I want to be drawing. The dot marks each country's geometric centre, not its capital, for the same reason.
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