Tracking worldwide security levels

The U.S. Department of State provides guidance for U.S citizens to understand important travel security information. The DOS issues an advisory level for every country in the world to keep U.S. citizens informed of potential risks.

In addition to its advisory level, the DOS provides specific information on any risk indicators affecting each country and specific advice on what travelers can do before they leave and once abroad to provide for their own safety. We encourage all students and their families to review the DOS country specific information for their program country and any countries where students intend to travel independently while abroad. This information can be found on the travel.state.gov website. 

The advisory levels are as follows:

If the U.S. State Department issues an official notice for any one of our program locations, and the message includes an official State Department recommendation that all U.S. citizens evacuate the country, our standard course of action will be to cancel the program and proceed with evacuation procedures. If the program has not yet started, our standard course of action will be to suspend the program. Exceptions can be made if the language in the official notice gives our management clear reason to believe that the warning is unlikely to impact the city/cities where our program is operating. If we do suspend a program, we will work with students to transfer them to another program, with consideration given to the academic mission of the program and/or student.

There are a wide variety of criteria that we use to determine whether or not to restrict independent travel to a specific region. The restriction may be based on an ongoing situation which poses an immediate threat to our participants, designated regions of the country that are dangerous for our participants, the lack of services for US citizens, or other factors.

This list of restricted locations is maintained and updated based on our direct observation, recommendations of the US Department of State and other national governments, Overseas Security Advisory Council security reports, WHO reports, and consultation with our private security advisors. We reserve the right to add countries/regions to this list, without notice. 
All our students are made aware of the regions that have travel restrictions when they sign our Code of Conduct which states that they will abide by all travel restrictions established by WorldStrides. It is the student's responsibility to be aware of the most current travel restrictions, which can always be accessed on our website. Violation of any travel restriction is cause for automatic dismissal from the program, and participants may be required to return to the U.S. immediately.

In order to maintain the highest level of safety for our participants, we have restricted independent travel to certain areas of the world. Our participants are not allowed to independently enter or travel within the following regions during the participation of a program without express permission.

Last Updated: 12/2025