Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

I’m proud to announce the launch of Downtempo’s first home-grown product, “Is It Safe to Visit?“.

Built with Brent Fitzgerald from Taco Lab, our product aggregates the travel advisories from the U.S. Department of State, Canadian Foreign Affairs Department, Australia Smart Traveler, and New Zealand Safe Travel. We normalize and average out the data, creating an overall risk rating for the country, in addition to providing the ratings given by each country as well.

The idea for this product came during my around-the-world trip, when I was looking for a site that provides this data but couldn’t a site that aggregated this data in an easy-to-read format. So we solved the problem by building the site and putting it out there for everyone else to use. It’s a very simple Ruby on Rails site, and for all of you mashup geeks, we’ll have XML APIs for coming soon for all the travel advisory data.

Our goal is to provide more transparency to the travel advisory system and provide a 1-stop website for users interested in the current advisory status for a specific country. We WANT people to travel, and we’re definitely not trying to discourage people from traveling, just to make it easy to discover the travel advisory information thats already been published.

So give it a try! Check out some random countries, or take a look to find out the average opinion about whether it’s safe to visit South Africa or safe to visit Mozambique, two countries that I’m headed to later this month!

As the site footer says, “Keep traveling”. If you have any feedback on the product, we’d love to hear your opinion in our forums on Get Satisfaction.