I built a 7-dimension city rating system in Notion for tracking everywhere I've stayed
I do a lot of slow travel — a month here, two months there — and I kept running into the same problem: I'd leave a city and six months later completely forget what the coworking situation was like, or whether the internet was reliable, or how much I was actually spending.
So I built a city rating database in Notion that scores every place across 7 dimensions:
- Cost of living
- Internet reliability
- Safety
- Walkability
- Food scene
- Coworking access
- Overall vibe
Each one gets a 1–5 score and the template auto-calculates an overall rating and assigns a tier (Great / Good / Okay / Skip). I also added views filtered by region, by tier, and by cost level so I can quickly pull up "all affordable cities in Southeast Asia that scored above 4" when I'm planning the next trip.
After a while I added more databases around it — trip tracking, accommodation history, a Schengen day counter, even a SIM card log — and it turned into a full workspace I use for everything travel-related.
The rating system is the part I keep coming back to though. It's turned my messy "I think Lisbon was great?" memories into actual data I can compare.
Happy to answer questions about the setup or formulas if anyone's building something similar.