Booking Priority™ and the Booking Score

The five levels

Every score falls into one of five bands. The bands are the vocabulary of the whole site — on a city page you can read four columns and be done in thirty seconds.

• ✓ Book ASAP (90–100). Very high demand. Slots disappear days or weeks ahead and there is no useful alternative queue.
• ✓ Book Ahead (70–89). Popular and it fills up. Booking in advance is the sensible default, especially in season.
• ✓ Worth Booking (40–69). A genuinely good experience with no urgency. Book it if you know your dates.
• ✓ Can Wait (20–39). Low demand. Decide when you arrive and you will be fine.
• ✓ No Booking Needed (0–19). Free, walk-in, or so easy to get that pre-booking is a waste of your attention.

What moves a score

Sell-out risk carries the most weight, followed by whether entry is timed at all. An attraction can be world-famous and still score low: the Trevi Fountain is one of the most visited places in Europe and scores 8, because there is nothing to buy.

The opposite happens too. A small gallery nobody outside the city has heard of can score in the nineties if it caps visitors and releases slots weeks in advance.

What the score is not

It is not a quality rating, and it is not an aggregate of user reviews. It is our editorial judgement about booking urgency, published as a number so it can be argued with.

We also do not weight it by commission. If we did, nothing would ever score under forty.

When scores change

Scores are reviewed as availability, pricing and access rules shift. Seasonality is handled inside the entry rather than by rewriting the score twice a year: where a booking window differs in peak months, both figures are shown.