Method
How we source safety data
Most travel sites give a country one vague verdict and never say when they decided it. We rate zones separately, name the source, and stamp the date, so you can judge how much weight the rating deserves instead of taking our word for it.
Where it comes from
Every zone rating starts from official government travel advisories, because those are the only sources with consular reporting behind them. The ones we read are the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the US State Department, Global Affairs Canada, and the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. Each zone on the site records which of them it came from, and links out so you can read the original.
Where those advisories disagree we say so rather than averaging them into a single number, since a blended score hides exactly the disagreement worth knowing about. Advisories are written for the issuing country's own nationals, so two of them can be honestly different about the same road.
Why zones and not countries
A national rating is almost always wrong somewhere. It is wrong about the capital if it was set by a border conflict, and wrong about the border if it was set by the capital. The advisories themselves recognise this for the countries that make headlines, and stop bothering for the forty-odd that do not. Those are the ones where zone ratings are worth the most, so those are the ones we spend time on.
What the levels mean
Low
Normal precautions. The ordinary risks of travelling anywhere, mostly opportunistic theft in crowds and on transport.
Moderate
Exercise increased caution. Something specific is worth knowing about: a pattern of scams, unrest that flares, or areas that are fine by day and not after dark.
High
Reconsider travel to this zone. There is a documented, current risk to visitors, not a general reputation.
Do not travel
Every advisory we track says stay out. We repeat that rather than soften it.
How fresh it is
Every zone carries the date we last checked it against its source, shown on the page rather than buried. If a date looks old to you, treat the rating as old, which is the whole reason we print it.
Slow drift and fast danger are handled differently. A rating that is merely ageing gets the date and nothing more. A zone that turns in hours gets an alert banner that loads separately from the page itself, so a page you opened from a cached copy still shows today's warning rather than yesterday's calm.
What we do not claim
We are not a security service and this is not advice for a specific trip. We do not have sources on the ground in every zone we rate, and we do not pretend that reading four advisories is the same as being there. Before you travel, read your own government's advisory, because it is the one your insurer and your embassy will act on.
Nobody pays to change a safety rating. There is no arrangement under which a tour operator, hotel, or tourism board can influence one, including in Cameroon, where we run trips ourselves.
Who maintains it
Vourigo is built and maintained from Cameroon. The same people who write these pages run the tours we operate, which is the reason the safety work exists: we were answering these questions for travellers one message at a time long before there was a site to put the answers on.
If a rating, a phone number, or a date on this site is wrong, tell us. There is a "was this right?" prompt on every safety page, and it reaches whoever maintains that country. Corrections from people who have just been somewhere are the fastest signal we get.