How offyougo works
Every place is ranked by the same open formula over public data. Nobody picks or reorders places by hand, and nobody can pay to move up.
The score
A place's score for your trip is a weighted sum (score-v1). Parts that cannot be judged for a trip are left out and the rest rescaled, never guessed:
- Fit to your trip, 35%: how many of your interests it covers (70%) and how well its kind suits your group (30%).
- Quality, 35%: signals from open data, each weighted:
- Food Standards Agency hygiene rating (food places only): 0.2
- How many Wikipedia and Wikimedia pages it has (Wikidata): 0.25
- Historic England listing: Grade I, II* or scheduled monument: 0.15
- An official website is known: 0.1
- An openly licensed photo exists (Wikimedia Commons): 0.15
- How much OpenStreetMap says: opening hours, access, fees, dogs: 0.15
- Season, 15%: how good it is in your month (a wild swim in July, not in January).
- Travel, 15%: whether it is within reach of your base by your way of travelling. This part waits for travel times; until then bases are compared by straight-line distance, and the pages say so.
A place gets its own page when its score for any trip reaches 0.35 and it lies inside a national park, or within 5 km of one on land of a council that covers the park.
The facts
Facts come from open datasets: OpenStreetMap, Overture Maps, the Food Standards Agency, Historic England, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, NaPTAN and others, listed with their licences on Sources and licences. Each fact on a page says where it came from and when it was checked. A fact we do not have is left out, never filled with a guess.
The one or two sentences that describe a place are written by Claude, an AI model from Anthropic, from those facts only, and each is marked as such. Reviews, articles and other people's words are never copied.
Checking the formula
The owner reviews places and votes on them. The votes are a test set for the formula: they show where it agrees with a person who knows the place, and where the weights need changing. They never move a single place by hand. Places voted "wrong info", "duplicate" or "not in this park" are held back until the data is fixed.
How offyougo makes money
It does not, yet. There are no adverts and no paid placements. Later, some links to places to stay may be affiliate links, which pay offyougo a small commission when you book, at no cost to you. When they arrive they will be marked on the page, and they will never change the ranking: the formula has no input for them.