The most dangerous places to travel right now are the ones you would expect, and the reasons have not softened. Syria, South Sudan, Mali, Libya, Sudan and Yemen sit at the very bottom of our table, each carrying a full “advise against all travel” footprint from the Foreign Office. Haiti stays down there too, pinned by gang control of Port-au-Prince, and across the Sahel the picture has if anything worsened, with a fuel blockade squeezing Bamako and armed groups pushing further into Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and Somalia round out a bottom tier where the score is driven by conflict, kidnap risk and the simple fact that British help on the ground is severely limited. In total 33 countries fall into our two red bands, the ones we would only consider for essential travel, if at all.

A few things moved since our last update. The clearest piece of good news is Indonesia, where the Foreign Office has dropped its standing advice against travel to the active volcanoes and says it will not reimpose a blanket warning for future eruptions, so Bali and the main islands now carry no territorial advisory at all. Going the other way, twelve countries slipped down a single band this time. Spain and the Maldives move from our top tier into “generally safe, stay aware”, Spain because of the Foreign Office warning on drink and needle spiking in the nightlife spots, the Maldives because same-sex relationships remain illegal and medical cover outside Male is thin. Georgia, Tanzania, Ghana and Guinea drift down on limited rural healthcare, the Philippines on its mix of kidnap and crime risk, and Western Sahara on criminalised same-sex activity layered over an existing caution. None of these are dramatic swings, they are the result of reading each current page line by line rather than any single new emergency.

For most trips the news is reassuring. 120 countries sit in our safest band and another 45 just below it, which covers almost all of Europe, Japan, Singapore, the Gulf states and the small island nations that make up the calmest end of the list. The real caution for holidaymakers clusters in a familiar handful of high-crime destinations that are otherwise popular, South Africa, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas and Mexico among them, where the smart move is planning your routes, sticking to the areas visitors know and keeping valuables out of sight. Score a trip honestly and the pattern is steady: danger concentrates in conflict zones and a short list of crime hotspots, while the great majority of the world remains open to a careful traveller.