How trustworthy are government travel advice sites? Are there alternatives?

3/22/2013 10:31:43 AM

I know it’s a far stretch, and I am probably the only person visiting the site, but there is a website I found where one can directly ask questions like that.

But jokes aside:

  • Your local embassy in the respective country should be a good source. If you are really concerned about a specific risk (like rape in India, radiation in Japan, kidnapping in Brazil), I would consider it highly to call the embassy and inquire directly on the issue. I would NOT expect them however to have a website that lists up all the dangers of their host country.

  • Newspapers and their recent reports are tricky, specially ones from abroad. Some crimes are so prevalent in a country that foreign media simply do not report them anymore.

  • Websites: Google “Crime stats [country]” and Wikipedia are really good sources. While they might not give you the data from last Saturday, I consider them a great resource to compare your safety to other places that I know personally.

I think the biggest issue with this type of information is the diversity that can exist in a country together with the diversity of travelers. Example: Japanese tourists abroad are much more likely to be victims of fraud committed by other Japanese citizens since they are overly trusted due to the generally poor language skills of Japanese tourists. Also it was reported that someone in Hong Kong, which I consider one of the safest places on earth, was mugged last year after somehow revealing in a bar that he had a lot of cash on him. So who you are and exactly where in a country you go might have a huge impact on how dangerous it actually is, be it environmentally or crime-related.

3/22/2013 2:30:52 AM

While there is no way to know this for every case, it depends which government. A government is likely to play down issues in their own country and exaggerate that in others.

The exaggeration is partly to protect themselves and partly because the situation of an entire country can rarely be described in a few pages. So, while a report can recommend to avoid a country entirely due to violence, it may be isolated to only some areas far off from where you will be visiting.

The more information sources you read, the better chance you will have of having an accurate idea. I would correlate issues mentioned in government reports with events in the media to check if they are indeed still relevant.

For example, the Government of Canada has travel advisories for a number of countries which describe issues in quite some details. There is both a publication and a valid-until date but neither says when the information was gathered.

Guidebooks tend to err on the side of caution and are rarely updated, so that is the information I found the least accurate, despite them often knowing about the best hotels and restaurants well because those tend to change less.

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

About me

Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

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