If you are looking to avoid becoming a crime statistic while travelling on your holidays, there are many ways to protect yourself, keep your documents safe and come home in one piece. Certainly a good dose of common sense goes a long way, along with knowing about your destination and travelling with experienced travellers or travel companies. Safe traveller advice from government sites, making sure you are adequately insured, mobile messaging and information and having the back up of international companies like iSOS also give travellers peace of mind.
If you want to avoid all of the above then the easiest way to stay out of trouble is to travel to only the safest cities. Just down the road from Disneyland is the city of Irvine, which has been nominated as the safest city in America, by the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report, for the eighth year in a row. I used to visit my best friends, who lived there for a couple of years and "Disneyland suburban" is not a bad analogy for the manicured streets, row after row of groomed gardens leading to leafy shopping malls with not a policeman in sight. Irvine works hard at being a city looking to attract people on lifestyle choices and along with those choices, comes the safety factor which provides the cherry on top of a cake everyone wants to eat.
Along with FBI reports you can check out the Global City Reviews and Personal Safety Rankings by Mercer, which are based on measures of internal stability, crime levels, law enforcement effectiveness and host country international. It comes as no surprise that the cities high on the list of most liveable are also high on safety. European cities dominated the top ten most liveable cities with Vienna, again named best city in the world, along with Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva and Bern. Our friends across the Tasman in Auckland and the always friendly Canucks in Vancouver also made it onto the top ten list.
With so many cities in the top ten, European cities rank high on the personal safety ranking, with Luxembourg, Bern, Helsinki, Zurich and Vienna ranking in the top five. Within the Asia Pacific region it comes as no surprise that Singapore ranks the safest, after all, benevolent dictatorship has a lot going for it, as long as you don't chew gum and wear long hair. Sorry that must have been a 70s flashback. Our capital cities rank 25th in safety within the Asia Pac region, which leaves plenty of room for improvement.
When looking at the Mercer lists, it becomes obvious the world we know is becoming a safer place to travel but for many that isn't enough and there will always be a need to visit the edges. Edges in Africa, Central and South America along with unexplored Asia will always attract travellers wanting to see the occasional gun, chaos and things not seen by their neighbours, who just booked on the latest European vacation.
No comments:
Post a Comment