Wander Atlas publishes a lot of numbers: how busy a place gets and when, opening hours, ratings, monthly temperatures and rainfall. A number is only worth something if you know where it came from, so this page explains the source of everything we measure. Journalists, researchers and other travel sites are welcome to quote any figure here, with a link back to the page it appears on.
Crowd data
Every “best time to visit” chart on this site comes from measured foot traffic, not surveys or guesswork. We license busyness estimates for each venue from BestTime.app, which builds them from real visit patterns. We then line every chart up with the venue’s verified opening hours, so you will never see a “quiet hour” at 7am for a museum that opens at 10. Charts are refreshed on a rolling schedule, and when a venue changes its hours, its chart is adjusted to match.
What this means for you: when a Wander Atlas page says a market is busiest on Saturday afternoons, that is what was measured at that market, not a general assumption that weekends are busy.
Venue facts: ratings, hours, closures
- A quality bar. Where verified rating data exists, we only write about places rated 4.0★ or higher with a meaningful number of reviews. Places below that bar don’t get a guide.
- Kept current. Venue details are re-checked on a rolling schedule (every venue comes up roughly once a quarter), and a page for a place we can no longer confirm is open is taken down. We would rather have one fewer page than send you to a locked door.
- Nothing made up. We never invent opening hours, prices or addresses. Those details come from commercial venue databases and official sources, and if we cannot confirm something, we leave it out.
Climate and “when to go” tables
Monthly temperature and rainfall figures are calculated from ten full years of archived weather data (NASA POWER, NASA’s meteorological reanalysis archive), taken at the coordinates of a real venue in the city we cover most in each country. Each page says which city its figures describe. Public-holiday tables come from national holiday calendars and are updated twice a year to cover the current year and the next.
Itineraries
Every day-by-day itinerary is built only from places that have already passed the checks above: confirmed hours, confirmed ratings, real coordinates. Walking times between stops are worked out from those coordinates, not estimated by feel. We publish an itinerary for a city only once we have enough verified guides there to fill it properly.
Photos
Every image comes from a licensed or open source (Wikimedia Commons, Foursquare, Openverse, official open-data programmes), with attribution, and is checked against the source’s own record of what it shows. A photo of a different branch of the same chain is rejected. A wrong photo never ships. When no verified photo of the actual place exists, the guide runs without one rather than with someone else’s.
The editor
Guides are drafted with AI assistance, which is disclosed on every article, and reviewed by Pixer, a Korean travel editor who has personally travelled to more than twenty countries. Who Pixer is, and how AI assistance and human review divide the work, is on the editorial policy page.
Citing Wander Atlas
You are welcome to reference our charts and tables. Please credit “Wander Atlas” and link to the specific page; every crowd chart, climate table and itinerary has a stable URL. For press or data questions, see the contact page.