How we score wonder, and the other five

The place pages carry two kinds of number. Temperatures, rain days, altitudes, coordinates and days are measurements, rounded and sourced from normals. The six scores are not measurements. They are judgements, set by the editors, argued over, and printed with a one-to-ten scale because a scale is easier to compare than a paragraph. This note says what each one means so that the Place Comparator is used honestly.

Remoteness

How far the place is from a hospital, a road and a flight that runs every day. Zhangjiajie is a three: an airport an hour away, a city at the gate. Antarctica is a ten: two days by ship from the nearest town. Remoteness is the score that the Monte Carlo simulator uses for delay probabilities, and it is also a proxy for what the place costs to reach.

Effort

What the trip asks of the body on its hardest day. The Okavango is a three: game drives and a mokoro. The Jomolhari trek is an eight: a 4,870 metre pass with a full pack. Effort is about the hardest day rather than the average, because the hardest day is the one that stops people.

Cost

The comfort band’s per-day rate plus the fixed items, ranked. Ladakh is a three. Antarctica is a ten. Cost does not measure value; the cheapest places on the site include two of the most extraordinary.

Wonder

The score that the site exists for, and the only one that is allowed to be a ten. It measures the gap between the place and anywhere else: whether the ground, the light, the animals or the ice do something that has no substitute. Eleven places score a ten and the editors argued about all of them. A place below eight is not on the site. Wonder is the score that the comparator’s verdict weights most heavily by default, and you can change that.

Risk

The probability that something goes wrong that a sensible traveller could not have prevented: heat, gas, altitude, security, wildlife, sea. The Danakil is a seven and the highest; the Galápagos is a two. A ten would mean we do not think you should go, and then the place would not be here. Risk is deliberately conservative and read alongside the hazards list on the page, which says what the risk actually is.

Comfort

Where you sleep and what you eat on a typical night, in the comfort band. Okavango camps are an eight. The Danakil, on a mattress on the ground with rationed water, is a one. Comfort is the score that people underweight when planning and overweight on the third night, and the comparator shows it for that reason.