Editorial standards

How the scores are made

Every island is scored on six factors from 0 to 10: weather (20%), beaches (25%), things to do (25%), access from the US (10%), value (10%) and crowds (10%). One program reads the same inputs for all 64 islands and sorts every list from the result. A conditional verdict on an island's own page takes 0.4 points off, a skip takes 1.0. Writers explain the order; they cannot change it. How we score islands sets out every formula.

Where the numbers come from

• Weather: the Open-Meteo historical weather archive, 2016 to 2025, at each island's main airport, for daytime highs, rainfall and sunshine; the Open-Meteo marine archive, 2022 to 2025, for sea temperature. Storm seasons come from the NOAA National Hurricane Center and the regional centers for the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
• Visitors: the latest full year of official tourism statistics, from the island's tourism authority or statistics office. Where only a country or regional figure exists, the island page says so, and where no figure measures the island at all, we leave the crowd factor out.
• Hotels: the cheapest double rated 3 stars or better, one night for two adults in the main visitor area, on Wednesday, January 13, 2027 and Wednesday, July 14, 2027, taxes and fees in, from Kayak, or from Google Hotels or Booking.com where Kayak would not load; each page says which.
• Flights: the US airports with a scheduled nonstop to each gateway, from the airport's own route data or its published airlines and destinations table. Seasonal routes count and are marked.
• Entry and pets: what a US citizen needs, and what it takes to bring a dog, from the government's own entry and pet-import pages.

Every page lists its sources at the foot, with a note on what each one confirms and the date it was checked.

The editors' scores

Beaches and things to do are judgments, so they use one published scale for every island, and each score is printed with a one-sentence reason naming the beaches or sights. They move when the island does: closures after a hurricane lower a things-to-do score until the island reopens.

What we do when a number is not published

We say so. We do not estimate a visitor count, a price or a flight, and we do not present a guess as a fact. A missing factor is left out and the other weights are scaled up, and the page says which.

Operator claims

We report what is true, not what a listing or a resort says. Claims about calm water, crowds, sightings or what a fee includes are the operator's until an official source confirms them, and our pages say whose claim it is.

Monthly weather in prose

Every island page renders its 12-month weather table from the dataset, so the figures cannot drift from the scores. The prose describes seasons in words and cites the official storm-season dates.

Photographs and illustrations

Every photograph of a place is a real photograph from Wikimedia Commons, credited on the privacy page. Byline portraits and some illustrative scenes, such as tour cards and some page headers, are generated; they never show a real place, and the credits list each one.