Twenty-four countries are off the table completely in this update, carrying our Do not travel rating because the Foreign Office advises against all or most travel to them. The bottom of the table reads like a roll call of the world’s active crises: Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Mali, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen sit at the very foot, alongside Russia and Ukraine, where the war shows no sign of easing, and Haiti, where gang control has pulled the state apart. The Middle East is still the single biggest driver of red on the map. The Foreign Office has kept its region-wide warning in place and calls the situation there deeply unpredictable, which keeps Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories firmly in the danger zone.

One rung up, Ecuador, Papua New Guinea and Western Sahara have slipped into our Dangerous, only if necessary band, and a run of familiar names now sit in the mid-table caution bands: South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, Morocco, Peru and Indonesia among them. None of that is down to a single dramatic headline. It is the everyday stuff the Foreign Office spells out on these pages, high city crime rates, drink spiking and spiked-drink assaults, protests that can turn violent at short notice, and real risks to women travelling alone. This refresh grades every one of those conduct warnings in full, so a fair few places that looked quieter in our last run now carry the marks their advice always justified. Think of it as a sharper read rather than a sudden slide.

It is not all one way. Indonesia is the stand-out mover in the opposite direction, with the Foreign Office lifting its long-running warnings around the country’s volcanoes and dropping the old advice against travel to Papua, so Bali, Java and Lombok are back to normal precautions for most trips. At the safe end nothing much has shifted. Iceland, Japan, Singapore, Ireland and the Nordic countries still score top marks for UK visitors, and the overwhelming majority of the world stays open: 153 countries land in our two green bands. The takeaway is the one we always come back to, which is to plan properly and check the detail for your exact region, not to cancel the trip.