How we score night tours

Each part is turned into its own 0-10 score first. Then the four are added up with these weights:

• Rated by travelers, 30%. The star rating, after an adjustment for how many people gave it.
• Review count, 10%. How many reviews the product page shows.
• Price per hour, 20%. What one person pays for each hour of tour.
• After dark, 40%. Our editors' score for how much the night is the point.

Each factor score is rounded to one decimal place before the weighting, and the final score is rounded to one decimal too. When two tours tie, the one with more reviews goes first. If they still tie, it falls back to alphabetical order of our internal product key, which is boring but at least it's stable.

The weights add to 100%, so a tour that maxed out all four would score 10.0. None does. The highest on the site right now is 8.8, and the median is 6.5.

Raw star ratings lie a little. A brand-new tour with a dozen five-star reviews from friends and early customers isn't really better than one rated 4.9 by thousands of strangers. So before we score a rating, we pull it toward 4.5.

The method: we pretend every tour has 150 extra reviews, all at 4.5 stars, and average them in. The adjusted rating is (rating × reviews + 4.5 × 150) ÷ (reviews + 150). A tour with 4,000 reviews barely moves. A 4.9 with 100 reviews gets dragged more than halfway to 4.5, down to 4.66.

Then the adjusted rating goes on a straight line. An adjusted 4.40 or lower scores 0. An adjusted 4.95 or higher scores 10. Everything between is in proportion, so each 0.055 of adjusted rating is worth one point.

That's a steep scale. It has to be. Almost every tour we record sits between 4.4 and 5.0, because 4.4 is our bar for recording a tour at all. If the scale ran from 1 to 5 every tour would score about the same.

Real example. Two Bangkok tours both show 4.9. The tuk-tuk night tour has 4,182 reviews, adjusts to 4.886 and scores 8.8. The twilight bamboo bicycle tour has 243, adjusts to 4.747 and scores 6.3. Same stars, two and a half points apart.

Review count runs on a log scale, because the gap between 25 and 250 reviews tells you far more than the gap between 2,500 and 2,750. Twenty-five reviews or fewer scores 2. Five thousand or more scores 10. In between, each tenfold jump in reviews is worth about the same number of points. A tour with 500 reviews lands around 6.5.

Price per hour is the one people argue with, so here it is in full.

• We take the from-price per adult in US dollars shown on the product page on October 26, 2026. If a page showed a struck-through sale price, we recorded the sale price and flagged it. Thirty-one tours were on sale that day.
• If the tour is sold per group (a private tour, mostly), we split the group price between two people. A couple is the usual buyer.
• We divide by the duration in hours, using the shortest option if the page gives a range. Anything shorter than half an hour counts as half an hour, and anything longer than four hours counts as four.
• That four-hour cap is deliberate. A pub crawl that says it lasts nine hours mostly lasts nine hours because the last bar stays open. An eight-hour Mauna Kea trip spends a good chunk of that in a van. Hours past four don't make a tour better value in our book.
• Then another log scale: $12 (€10.70) an hour or less scores 10, $120 (€107) an hour or more scores 1.
• Tip-based walks, where you pay a small booking fee and then tip what you think it was worth, have no real price to judge. They get a flat 5.0, the middle of the scale.

Two edge cases from the data. The private night monuments tour in Washington, DC is $595 (€532) for a group of one to four. We count $298 (€266) a head, two hours, so $149 (€133) an hour, and it scores the minimum 1 on value. A 15-minute Las Vegas helicopter flight is treated as a 30-minute product, which still leaves it at $200 (€179) an hour and a value score of 1.

This is the part a spreadsheet can't do. For every tour, a researcher reads the product page and scores how much the night changes the experience, on one scale used across the whole site:

• 10: only possible at night, or the dark is the point. Night safaris, rainforest night walks, bioluminescent bays, stargazing, and after-hours entry the day ticket doesn't give you, like the Colosseum at night or the Vatican Museums on a Friday evening.
• 8: built for the night. A ghost tour with access you only get after hours, such as underground vaults or a cemetery that's locked by day's end; a bus or boat route chosen for the illuminations; a night market food tour.
• 6: better at night but similar by day. An evening old-town walk, a dinner food walk, a sunset cruise that runs into dusk, a guided pub crawl.
• 4: a day product that also runs in the evening. We record one only if it's among a city's best.
• Below 4, we leave the tour out.

Scores in between (7, 6.5, 9) are allowed when a tour sits between two anchors. In practice the floor is 5: nothing on the site scores lower. Of the 340 tours, 51 score 10, 54 score 8 and 149 score 6. Every score comes with a one-line reason in our data, so you can see what the night adds.

Why 40%? Because without it, a cheap, hugely reviewed daytime-style walking tour that also has an 8 p.m. slot would beat a cloud-forest night walk every time. That's not the list anyone wants.

The highest Night Score right now belongs to Bangkok by Night: Temples, Markets and Food Tuk-Tuk Tour, listed on Viator. The product page on October 26, 2026 showed 4.9 stars from 4,182 reviews, four hours, from $38 (€34) per adult. Our researcher scored it 8 after dark: the flower market is busiest at night, the temple walls are floodlit and Chinatown's street food peaks late.

• Rating: (4.9 × 4,182 + 4.5 × 150) ÷ 4,332 = 4.886. On the 4.40-to-4.95 line that's 8.8.
• Reviews: 4,182 is just short of 5,000, so 9.7.
• Value: $38 (€34) over four hours is $9.51 (€8.50) an hour. Under $12 (€10.70), so a full 10.
• After dark: 8.
• Night Score: 0.30 × 8.8 + 0.10 × 9.7 + 0.20 × 10 + 0.40 × 8 = 2.64 + 0.97 + 2.00 + 3.20 = 8.81, shown as 8.8.

Now a tour that the price factor hurts. Mauna Kea Summit and Stars Small-Group Adventure Tour on Hawaii Island shows 4.9 from 1,681 reviews and is a perfect 10 after dark. But it costs $330 (€295) and lasts eight hours. With the four-hour cap that's $82 (€74) an hour and a value score of 2.5, so it lands at 7.9. Without the cap it would be about $41 (€37) an hour, value 5.2, and a score of 8.4. We think the cap is right. You're paying for the drive up a mountain, and that's fine, but it isn't extra tour.

And one that the rating sinks. A London bar and club crawl rated 4.4 by 1,485 people scores a full 10 on value, at $34 (€30) for six hours. Its adjusted rating is 4.409, which is 0.2 on our scale. Final score: 5.3.

The score sorts tours. These rules decide which of them make each page.

• City pages show the city's ten highest-scoring tours, with no other filter.
• Tour type pages (ghost tours, stargazing and the rest) show the top 12 of that type, with no more than three from any one city. The cap keeps one city with a deep bench of ghost walks from filling the page. London already hits it.
• After-dark sight pages show up to eight tours that our researchers tagged to that sight.
• Ranking lists allow two tours per city, except the two ghost lists, which allow three. The world list shows 20, the European and American lists 15, the European ghost list 12 and the American ghost list 15. Evening shows (the Mexico City lucha libre nights) appear on their city page but never on a list.
• The family list only takes tours the product page doesn't flag as unsuitable for children, with a stated minimum age of 8 or lower (no stated age counts as none), and never a pub crawl.
• The cheap list takes tours at $35 (€31) per person or less, using the same per-person price as the value factor. A tip-based walk counts at its booking fee.

For the caps, a tour outside our 32 cities belongs to the place it starts from, so the Teide stargazing tours count as Tenerife and the Mauna Kea ones as Mauna Kea. The regional lists for Europe and the US only draw from tours based in our 32 cities.

Every tour was read on its own product page on October 26, 2026. GetYourGuide pages were read in US dollars, and Viator shows dollars by default. Of the 340 tours, 250 are on Viator and 90 on GetYourGuide. Where a tour was sold on both, we kept one listing, the one with more reviews or the lower price, and noted the other.

To be recorded at all, a tour needs a 4.4 rating and 50 reviews. Wildlife, bioluminescent and stargazing tours in remote places only need 25 reviews, because a frog walk in Monteverde will never collect what a London ghost walk does.

The euro figures next to every price use European Central Bank reference rates from October 23, 2026. Sunset and twilight times come from the NOAA solar equations (see what time it gets dark). Night temperatures on city pages come from the Open-Meteo historical archive, averaged over 2016 to 2025. None of those three feed the Night Score.

The site earns a commission when you book through its GetYourGuide and Viator links. That has no input to the formula. Prices and ratings change all the time, so a score is a snapshot of one day. Check the live page before you pay.