FAQ
Questions families actually ask us.
The short versions. The long versions live on the methodology page and in the published rubric.
What is Destinations for Family?
A site that gives every holiday destination a plain-English family-fit rating, from Outstanding down to not a strong fit, for how well it works for a family trip. It's worked out from real data: maps, climate records, sea conditions, Blue Flag registers and places data. We rate the destination itself, the bit outside the hotel gate that decides most of how the week actually goes.
How are the ratings worked out?
A deterministic scoring engine turns harvested evidence into the rating you see. Each destination is measured on six things families care about (getting there, weather, natural features, walking around, amenities, things to do), weighted by the ages of the children going. Nobody here types a rating into a destination, and the full rubric, every threshold and weight, is published. How we score →
Can a destination, hotel or tour operator pay for a better score?
No. There is no mechanism for it: scores are computed from evidence by the engine, and a firewall in the code keeps every hand-written part of the site (words, editorial, booking links) free of numbers. Commission never reorders a ranking, and the best option is listed even when it pays us nothing. How we make money →
How does the site make money?
Some booking links may pay us a referral commission when you book, at no extra cost to you. That is the whole model. Rankings and data decide what appears on every page; incentives never do. The full version →
Why does the score change when I pick a different month?
The weather sub-score is computed per calendar month from ten years of daily climate records and satellite sea temperatures, so picking October genuinely re-rates the destination for October. The same beach town can be a strong June trip and a weak November one, and the score should say so.
What do the age bands mean?
Babies & toddlers, school age, and teens. The evidence is the same; the weighting changes, because a pram changes what matters (flat walking, short transfers, calm seas) and a teenager changes it again (things to do carries more weight). Each band gets its own published score.
Why don't you recommend hotels?
Hotel choice depends on budget, apartment-versus-hotel and kids-club preferences that vary too much between families for one credible shortlist. We score the destination and verify how it books from the UK, then leave the hotel pick to you.
How fresh is the data?
Every signal records its source and the date it was gathered, shown on each destination page. Climate signals aggregate 2015-2024 daily records; map data comes from dated OpenStreetMap snapshots; sea temperature is satellite-observed. When evidence is re-harvested, the scores recompute.
Why are there only a handful of destinations so far?
Each destination gets a full evidence harvest: true settlement boundaries, venue surveys, ten years of climate, sea state, a reviewed web corpus. That takes real work per place, and we would rather publish a small catalogue scored properly than a big one padded with guesses. The catalogue is growing, beach towns first, with lake and mountain destinations to follow.
What does the confidence label mean?
A sub-score built on thinner evidence is capped at medium confidence and labelled as such. Where the evidence is too thin to support any score, we show nothing rather than invent a number.
Something we haven’t answered? Ask us directly.
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