How It Works | Epic Trips — The Epic Score Algorithm Explained

The Core Idea

Most travel guides describe what a destination is like during its "best season." That's useful — but it leaves out everything that matters for a serious adventure traveler: How good are the conditions in your specific week? How often are they actually good versus just average? What level of experience do they demand? Is this destination genuinely suited to your skill level?

Epic Trips answers all of those questions by pulling a decade of historical weather and ocean data for every destination and running it through activity-specific scoring models. The output is the Epic Score: a single number from 0 to 100 that tells you how good the conditions historically are for your chosen activity at that location during your exact travel window.

It's the same kind of analysis a seasoned local guide would do — but automated, data-driven, and available for 429 destinations across 11 adventure sports worldwide.

Step-by-Step: How a Score Is Calculated

1

We identify your travel window

You enter your start date, end date, activity, and experience level. We extract the calendar period — typically the month or weeks your trip falls in — and use that to anchor the historical data query.

2

We fetch 10 years of historical data

For each destination, we pull daily historical weather records for the same calendar window going back 10 years — so if you're traveling in March, we look at March across 10 past years. This gives us a statistically meaningful baseline instead of a single year's snapshot.

3

We pull ocean data for water sports

For surfing, kiteboarding, sailing, windsurfing, scuba, and snorkeling, we layer in historical wave height and swell period data from the Open-Meteo Marine API. Offshore conditions are often the most important variable for ocean sports — and most travel guides don't account for them at all.

4

We run the activity-specific scoring model

Each activity has its own scoring model that defines what conditions matter and how much each one counts. Skiing prioritizes snowfall, temperature, and wind. Surfing prioritizes swell height and consistency. Rock climbing prioritizes dry days and mild temperatures. The model weights each variable by how much it affects the quality of that specific activity.

5

We apply experience level filters

A destination rated "Expert Only" will score very differently for a beginner versus an expert. Our algorithm adjusts the scoring thresholds based on your experience level — so beginners aren't sent to big-wave breaks or double-black-diamond terrain, and experts aren't penalized for light-wind days that would be fine for advanced sailors.

6

We compute the Epic Score

The final Epic Score (0–100) is a weighted aggregate of the component scores below. Scores above 80 indicate historically excellent conditions. Scores of 50–79 indicate solid but variable conditions. Below 50, the historical record suggests below-average conditions for your activity during that window.

Epic Score Components

The Epic Score is built from four weighted components, each measuring a different dimension of what makes conditions good for adventure sports:

Conditions Match

50 pts

How well the specific activity-relevant conditions (wave height, snowfall, wind, temperature) match the ideal range for your activity and experience level. The heaviest weighted component — because raw conditions quality is the most important factor.

Weather Quality

20 pts

Overall weather pleasantness — precipitation, temperature comfort, and wind. Even if specific conditions are ideal for surfing, a destination with 80% chance of rain will score lower here than a dry, warm alternative.

Consistency

15 pts

How many days within the historical window were actually good, not just on average. A destination with 12 out of 14 good days scores higher than one with wildly variable conditions that average out to the same score.

Experience Fit

15 pts

How well the destination's typical conditions match your experience level. A destination known for heavy, powerful surf may score perfectly for an expert but poorly for a beginner — even if the conditions themselves are technically ideal.

Score Ratings Explained

Once the Epic Score is calculated, it maps to one of five rating tiers:

Score Range	Rating	What It Means
90–100	LEGENDARY	As good as it gets. Historical conditions are consistently excellent for your activity. Rare — few destinations score here for more than a few weeks per year.
75–89	EPIC	Strong conditions with high consistency. A very good time to visit — you'll almost certainly have an excellent experience.
60–74	SOLID	Good conditions with some variability. Worth visiting — expect mostly good days with the occasional off day.
40–59	DECENT	Mixed conditions. You might have great days and rough days. Worth considering if the destination is on your bucket list or other factors outweigh conditions.
0–39	POOR	Below-average historical conditions for this activity during this window. Consider a different destination or different travel dates.

How We Collect and Analyze Data

Epic Trips pulls from two trusted open-access climate datasets, both drawn from ERA5 reanalysis data — the same high-resolution historical climate records used by meteorologists, oceanographers, and climate scientists worldwide.

Open-Meteo Historical Weather API

Provides daily weather reanalysis data going back to 1940, covering temperature, wind speed and direction, precipitation, and snowfall at any location on Earth with 11km spatial resolution. For each destination, we query the exact GPS coordinates of the activity area — not just the nearest city — to ensure we're measuring the actual conditions travelers experience.

Open-Meteo Marine API

Provides historical ocean wave height, swell height, and swell period data for any ocean coordinates worldwide. This is essential for accurately scoring surf, kite, sailing, and dive destinations — where offshore conditions are the primary driver of experience quality. Wave height data is drawn from ERA5 ocean reanalysis with 0.5° resolution, providing reliable historical baselines for breaks and dive sites worldwide.

Data is pre-computed and cached for all 429 destinations across all 12 months of the year, allowing landing pages to load instantly. When you run a custom search for specific dates, live API calls are made and cached for 24 hours to keep results fresh without overloading the data source.

Seasonal Windows Methodology

Beyond the raw score calculation, Epic Trips maintains a curated database of seasonal windows for each activity-destination combination. These windows define the precise calendar periods when conditions are statistically most likely to be excellent — drawn from both historical data analysis and expert knowledge contributed by local guides, surf forecasters, and alpine professionals.

Seasonal windows serve two purposes: they power the month-by-month charts on destination pages, and they're used to determine when to alert users that a prime window is approaching. A destination with a narrow seasonal window (like the Mentawai Islands, whose legendary swells peak during a few specific weeks each year) is treated differently from an all-season destination like the Canary Islands.

When scoring a destination, we check whether your travel dates fall within a known prime window — and reward destinations that align with their optimal season. This prevents a situation where a destination scores well on average-temperature metrics while actually being in the off-season for that activity.

How to Interpret Results

A few things to keep in mind when reading Epic Scores:

Scores are probabilistic, not guarantees. A score of 90 means that historically, conditions during your window have been excellent about 90% of the time. It doesn't mean they'll be excellent this specific year. Weather is inherently variable — the score tells you the odds.
Higher isn't always better for your skill level. A 95-scoring big-wave destination in February may be the worst choice for a beginner surfer. Always cross-reference the score with the Experience Level Guide on each destination page.
Use the month-by-month chart to find adjacent windows. If your dates score 65, check adjacent months — you may find that shifting a week earlier or later moves you into an 85-scoring window.
Ocean scores are more variable than weather scores. Swell is harder to predict historically than temperature. If you're planning for surfing in particular, treat the score as a strong signal but not a certainty, and monitor surf forecasts closer to your trip.
Consistency matters as much as peak score. Two destinations might both average 80, but one might have 12 solid days out of 14 while another alternates between 95-score days and 50-score days. The Consistency component (15 pts) captures this, but it's worth reading the detailed breakdown on each destination page.

How Epic Trips Works