How the open-o-meter works
Every destination gets a 1–5 rating for how alive it really is between October and April — not how pretty it is in summer. We weigh four things: whether the airport keeps year-round flights, how much of the town and its tavernas stay open, whether the sights and museums run winter hours, and how much genuine local life carries on.
It’s an editorial judgement, not a live feed — so treat it as a steer, not a guarantee, and always confirm specifics before you book.
How the research is done
Ratings are built from each place's own published material — municipal and regional tourism pages, museum and archaeological-site opening hours, ferry and airline winter timetables, and the operators' own seasonal notices — then read against each other and condensed into one number. Where sources disagree, the more pessimistic one wins, because a guide that over-promises in February is worse than useless.
They are re-checked before each winter and dated on the page, so you can see how old a judgement is. They are not a live feed, they are not a survey, and they are not sponsored: no business has paid to appear here, to be rated higher, or to be described more warmly, and none can.
What this guide is not
It is not a booking engine, and it does not pretend to have visited all thirty-nine airports in the same winter. Where a rating rests on documents rather than a visit, it rests on documents — that is why the method is written down here rather than dressed up as first-hand authority everywhere.
Corrections
If a rating is wrong, a link is dead or a place has closed, tell us through the contact page. Corrections are the fastest way this guide improves, and the openness ratings are published as an open dataset precisely so they can be checked.