Wandering Well

About.

Wandering Well is an anti-algorithm for travel — a catalogue of 12,164 less-touristed destinations across 233 countries and territories, grouped into 18 themes and ranked by a single score weighted equally between beauty and economic need.

Most modern algorithms reward popularity: clicks beget clicks. Popular places grow more popular. This has fuelled an overtourism crisis that has made both communities and travellers miserable. This site attempts to do the opposite: penalize popularity, and spread tourism around more equitably.

The score, briefly

The Wander Well Score (WWS) combines two halves at 50/50:

  • Beauty — proximity to water and mountains, density of protected and heritage architecture, concentration of museums, restaurants, cafés and places of worship within walking distance, a learned aesthetic score on the destination's primary photograph, and how often photographers from many countries actually shoot the place (rather than how many photos a small handful take).
  • Economic need — local income relative to the country's average and the regional unemployment gap, on the theory that traveller money is more useful in places that are beautiful AND comparatively under-resourced.

A tourism-intensity penalty is subtracted on top — Wikipedia pageview share, hotel density, and how disproportionately the place is talked about in English versus its own language. The full methodology with sources and edge cases lives at /methodology; this page is the plain-English version.

Where the data comes from

World Bank · UNESCO · Geoapify · OpenStreetMap · Eurostat (including hotel-occupancy statistics) · OECD · US Census ACS · ONS · StatCan · GDL · ILOSTAT · IBGE · Wikipedia · Flickr. Photo attributions on each destination page.

About Alex

Alexander Panetta is a journalist with 28 years of experience covering politics, currently on sabbatical pursuing a Master's degree in AI Management at Georgetown University. Wandering Well is part of his broader research into how institutions can use AI effectively, ethically, and safely. He also created the Daily AI Digest and an AI-for-professionals Substack.

Other work and contact:

Working with Alex

Alex writes, speaks, moderates events, and analyses AI integration for newsrooms and other institutions. For inquiries, see his Substack and LinkedIn bios.

What this site is, and is not

  • It is a research output and a writer's craft project.
  • It is built to be readable by AI agents — see /llms.txt.
  • It is not a booking tool, a travel agency, or affiliated with any tourism board.
  • It is not a definitive ranking. The score is a perspective, not a verdict.