Our methodology

TotScore — our 0–100 family-fit score

Every destination gets a TotScore that combines five dimensions weighted by what actually matters with kids in tow:

Transit ease is recomputed per origin — your TotScore for Tokyo from LAX (~11h) is different from your TotScore from Hawaii (~7h). The other four dimensions are intrinsic to the destination.

Tier labels: 85+ exceptional for families · 72–84 solid pick · 58–71 workable with prep · under 58 best for older kids only.

Trip Finder fit score

The Trip Finder quiz ranks destinations against your specific inputs (ages, budget, flight tolerance, vibe, month). It's a separate composite from TotScore — it weighs:

• Vibe match (60 points): Each matching trip-style tag you picked vs. the destination's tags.
• Budget match (25): Full credit if the hotel range matches; partial if one tier off; penalty if two tiers off.
• Flight tolerance (20): Full credit within tolerance; partial if one tier over; penalty if more.
• Kid-friendly rating (10): Direct addition of the destination's 1–10 score.
• Season match (8): Bonus if your travel month is in the destination's best season.
• Age warnings: Soft flags (long flights with babies, all-cultural with toddlers, etc.) — these are shown on the result card but don't subtract from the fit score.

Where our data comes from

• Official tourism boards & destination marketing organisations — activity, cost and seasonality information published by the destination itself.
• Government travel advisories — national foreign-office and state-department guidance, for safety baselines.
• National meteorological records — historical temperature, rainfall and storm-season windows, which is what our weather verdicts summarise.
• Published airline schedules — flight durations averaged across major US origins, which is what the transit-ease input is built from.
• Booking sites and hotel direct listings — nightly-rate ranges and availability, cross-checked rather than taken from one source.
• Aggregated traveller feedback — public review aggregates and parent-travel community discussion, read for recurring friction rather than for a quotable line. We paraphrase what a room broadly agrees on; we never reproduce an individual post as though it were an interview, and we never invent a username.
• Public travel-health guidance — vaccination and health-requirement information from national health authorities. It is a pointer to the primary source, never medical advice, and it goes stale — check the official page before you book.

We don't cite secondary travel blogs as primary sources, and we don't repeat a precise-sounding statistic we can't trace to the body that published it. Where a claim rests on a specific source, we link the page that actually supports it — a citation whose title promises a finding while the link lands on an organisation's homepage is worse than no citation.

What we don't do

• Sponsored content. Ever.
• "We tested this" claims. We have not stayed in these hotels, taken these tours or used this gear. You will read researched, compared and checked on this site, never "in our testing" or "hands-on", because that is what actually happened.
• Invented statistics, studies or sources. If the primary source can't be opened and read, the claim doesn't go in. Family-travel search results are full of precise-sounding figures that trace back to nothing, and we would rather cut a number than soften it.
• Fabricated traveller quotes or reviewer personas. Community consensus gets paraphrased and attributed to the room; individuals are not ventriloquised, and no article carries a made-up expert byline.
• Live price quotes. Flight and hotel prices are ranges based on recent data, not live rates. Always check the live rate before booking.
• Email gates. Nothing on this site asks for your email address, and there is no mailing list. Trip Finder and the shortlist run in your browser. (We do use standard, consent-gated analytics to see which pages get read — you can change that choice from the footer at any time.)

How we keep it current — and what a date here means

• Travel gear. Every product carries the date its price, rating and stock status were last read off the live listing, and a build gate blocks the deploy if a page tries to print a freshness date computed at render time instead. A "checked on" date that quietly means "a page rendered today" is how a stale recommendation passes for a current one, so ours means only what it says.
• Dead and unavailable listings fail closed. A product whose listing comes back unavailable is marked in the data and stops clearing the gate that lets it be recommended. The gear bar is explicit: 4.3 stars or better, at least 200 ratings, and in stock.
• Destinations and itineraries. Rewritten when something changes the answer — an advisory shifts, a resort closes, a route disappears — rather than on a calendar. We would rather tell you a page has not been revisited than stamp a fresh date on prose nobody reread.
• Flight times are averages across major US origins. The absolute number won't match your itinerary; the comparative tier (short, medium, long) is what the scoring actually uses.
• Prices and rates go stale between checks by default. Treat every figure here as the last thing we saw, not as today's quote.