Wander Atlas publishes numbers — crowd curves, opening hours, ratings, climate tables — and numbers are only useful if you know where they come from. This page is the source ledger for everything measurable on this site. Journalists, researchers and fellow travel sites are welcome to cite any figure here with a link back to the page it appears on.
Crowd data
Every “best time to visit” chart on this site is built from measured foot-traffic data, not surveys or guesswork. We license venue-level busyness estimates from BestTime.app, which models real visit patterns; we then clamp every curve to the venue’s verified opening hours, so a chart can never show a “quiet hour” at 7am for a museum that opens at 10. Charts are refreshed on a rolling schedule, and a venue whose hours change gets its curve re-clamped automatically.
What this means in practice: when a Wander Atlas page says a market peaks on Saturday afternoons, that reflects measured visit patterns at that specific venue — not a generic “weekends are busy” assumption.
Venue facts: ratings, hours, closures
- Quality floor. When verified rating data is available, we only feature places rated 4.0★ or higher with a meaningful number of reviews. Places below the floor simply don’t get a guide.
- Freshness. Venue data is re-checked on a rolling schedule (every venue lands in the queue roughly quarterly), and pages for places we can no longer verify as open are automatically unpublished. We would rather have one fewer page than send you to a shuttered door.
- No invented details. Our drafting process is instructed never to fabricate hours, prices or addresses; specifics come from commercial venue-data providers and official sources, and anything we can’t verify is left out.
Climate and “when to go” tables
Monthly temperature and rainfall figures are computed from ten complete years of archived weather observations (Open-Meteo historical archive), sampled at the city we cover most in each country — at a real venue’s coordinates, and the page names which city the figures describe. Public-holiday tables come from national holiday calendars and are refreshed twice a year, covering the current and following year.
Itineraries
Every day-by-day itinerary is assembled only from places that already passed the checks above — verified hours, verified ratings, real coordinates. Routes between stops are computed from those coordinates, so walking-time claims are geometry, not vibes. An itinerary is only published for a city once we have enough verified guides there to fill it honestly.
Photos
Every image is from a licensed or open source (Wikimedia Commons, Foursquare, Openverse, official open-data programs) with attribution, and passes an identity check against the source’s own metadata — a photo of a different branch of the same chain gets rejected. If we can’t find a verified photo of the actual place, we don’t publish the guide.
The editor
Guides are drafted with AI assistance — disclosed on every article — and reviewed under the editorial policy of Pixer, a Korean travel editor who has personally traveled more than twenty countries across Asia, Europe, the Americas and Oceania. Countries the editor has personally visited are marked on the home page, and we never claim personal visits we haven’t made. Read the full editorial policy for how AI assistance and human review divide the work.
Citing Wander Atlas
You’re 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.