Best Things to Do Around the World

City Viking publishes 259 travel guides: 181 attraction-by-attraction guides to cities and destinations across 81 US states, territories and countries, plus 78 world record countdowns ranked on a hard measured stat. You can browse everything by place from the destinations menu, or see the global lists on the record-breakers hub.

Our lists are not personal opinion dressed up as fact. Each guide starts from a data-led shortlist that combines a broad brainstorm of candidate places with live listings data, including public review counts and ratings from Google Places, then ranks candidates primarily by the volume of real visitor reviews they have earned. Category limits stop one type of attraction crowding out a balanced itinerary, and we hand-pick a small editor’s-choice set of the places most distinctive to each destination. See our editorial guidelines for the full method.

Not the way the city guides are. Each countdown turns on a single measurable figure — height, speed, surface area, flow rate, age — that is stated for every entry and used to sort it, so the order is something you can check rather than a matter of taste. Each list also says up front which standard it measures by: our tallest-buildings countdown ranks by height to architectural top, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s measure, which counts spires and parapets but never antennas or masts. Figures are re-checked against the current record holders and carry the date they were verified. Browse them all on the record-breakers hub.

Attractions close, prices change and seasons shift, so we re-check our published guides on a rolling basis. A verification pass re-checks that every external link still resolves, that each named place is still open and not closed, renamed or demolished, and that our superlative claims still hold. Guides that have been through one carry a dated “Last verified” line at the top, so you can see exactly how fresh the page you are reading is.

Our guides are produced by a small editorial team of researchers, writers, proofreaders and designers, and every entry is edited to meet our publishing standards before it goes live. We do not accept guest submissions, and nobody outside the organisation can place an entry or a link in a guide — editorial decisions rest with our editors alone. More about the team is on our about page.

No. No business can pay to be listed, to rank higher, or to have a rival left out. Entries are ranked primarily by the volume of real visitor reviews a place has already earned, and the small editor’s-choice set at the top of each guide is picked by our editors for how distinctive a place is to its destination — never sold. No entry on this site is sponsored or a paid placement, and we carry no advertising in our guides. Our editorial guidelines set out the ranking method in full.

From licensed and openly-licensed sources — Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons and openly-licensed Flickr. Every image carries a credit naming the photographer, the platform and, where the licence requires it, a link to the specific licence deed. We keep a private master record of the provenance and licence of every image on the site, and we do not publish an image we cannot attribute correctly. See our editorial guidelines for how we source and licence them.

Please tell us — we would rather be told when we are wrong than leave a mistake standing, and reader corrections are one of the ways we keep every guide trustworthy. If a place has closed, moved or changed, or a detail looks wrong, send it to us through our contact page. A correction from someone who knows a place first-hand outranks any data source we hold, and we do not ask for anything in return for making one.