Smart Tourism Index focuses on one question: how strong is a place as a base for exploring Switzerland?
That question shapes the whole scoring logic. The index is not a general quality judgment. It is a structured comparison through one defined lens.
The total score combines two layers.
Base Score looks at the local side of a destination. It draws on signals around local quality, landscape, culture, infrastructure, and tourism pressure. A place with low visitor pressure and strong local conditions scores well here.
Access Score measures what a place opens up beyond itself. It captures the major destinations, natural features, and experiences reachable within a reasonable travel radius.
A destination can perform well on one or both. The most interesting places in the ranking tend to combine a strong local base with meaningful regional reach.
The score draws on a broad set of public data signals.
These include local environmental context, tourism intensity, settlement and landscape character, public transport access, cultural and heritage indicators, and more.
Not every signal carries equal weight. Not every place ranks well for the same reason.
The goal is not to reduce places to a single label. It is to create a fair, comparable view of destination value across 184 Swiss places — using the same criteria applied consistently.
The project uses publicly available data. But working with public data is not the same as having ready-to-use data.
Sources include the Swiss Federal Statistical Office BFS, MeteoSwiss, Swiss GTFS, swissTLM3D, OpenStreetMap, and more. These were built for different purposes, in different structures, at different geographic levels.
Making them work together in a way that produces fair, comparable results — across 184 places — was the core challenge. That process involved cleaning, normalisation, alignment, and calibration at every stage.
The methodology is open. All code and data work is available on GitHub →
Visibility and suitability are not the same thing.
A well-known destination with high visitor pressure will have that pressure factored into its score. If the local conditions are stretched and alternatives within range are limited, the score reflects that.
A less prominent place that works well as a base — lower pressure, strong local quality, good regional reach — can rank above it.
That is by design. The ranking is built to surface a different set of answers to the question of where to base a trip through Switzerland.
No ranking captures the full reality of travel.
Smart Tourism Index is one structured perspective. It is built from public data and explicit logic, but it still depends on definitions, source quality, and the choices made in how inputs are weighted and combined.
It works best as an additional lens — not as a final answer. If something looks wrong, it is worth questioning.