How to find things to do in a new city, in 7 steps

To find things to do in a new city, pick a centre point, keep only places within walking range, judge each by rating and review count together, and check the unrated ones before you cut. In the Brussels data I tested, 39 sights near the Grand-Place narrowed to 15.

Disclosure: I built NomadSwipe, an Android trip planner, and I wrote this guide. The numbers come from the NomadSwipe app's stored Brussels place data, read on 4 November 2026 with read-only queries. Outside facts come from the Wikipedia pages listed under Sources.

The 7 steps

1. Pick one city and one centre point.

   A city name alone does not guarantee that every result is in the city. The Brussels deck holds 545 place cards, and 25 of them sit more than 50 km from the Grand-Place. The eight farthest are between 7,345 km and 9,046 km away, and the stored addresses of three of the gardens that surfaced are in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Washington, DC. Choose one anchor, such as the main square, and a radius you would walk or ride. I used the Grand-Place and 3 km, which kept 330 of the 545 cards.

2. Separate sights from food, drinks and hotels.

   Mixed lists bury the things you came to see. Inside the 3 km ring the deck holds 143 restaurants, 73 hotels and 39 cards stored as a museum, park, garden, zoo, historical site or tourist attraction. Sights are about one card in eight. Filter by category first, then do the same pass for food. The stored label is loose, so read the name: four karaoke venues in the ring are typed as tourist attractions.

3. Read rating and review count together.

   A rating says how happy reviewers were, and the review count says how many of them there were. You need both. Across the whole Brussels deck, 409 cards have a rating, the median is 4.1, and only 81 are 4.5 or higher. Of those 81, 28 have fewer than 100 reviews. Eight cards are rated a perfect 5.0, and seven of those have fewer than 20 reviews. My first-pass line is 4.0 or higher with at least 100 reviews. It is my own rule of thumb, not a standard, and the findings below show why I use two numbers.

4. Check the unrated places before you cut.

   An empty rating means unknown, not bad. In the ring, 15 of the 39 sights have no stored rating, including Leopold Park and Parc de Forest. Just outside it, 5.4 km from the Grand-Place, the Atomium card has no rating either. Wikipedia says the Atomium was built for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair and stands 102 metres tall, so a rating filter alone would have dropped it. Scan the unrated cards by name and decide on what you know.

5. Swipe fast and save only the clear yes answers.

   Going card by card is quicker than reading lists, because each place is one decision. In NomadSwipe a card shows a photo, a category tag, the distance, the rating and Skip and Save buttons. Swipe right or tap Save and the place goes into the trip's shortlist. Skip is a no. Keep the shortlist small enough to do in the days you have. To save places in Google Maps instead, read how to save places in Google Maps.

   

   

6. Put the shortlist on a map and remove outliers.

   Open the trip and every saved place is pinned. A pin that lands in another country is a data slip, not a bargain, so drop it. Clusters show you which places can share a day. For turning clusters into days, use the 8-step method in how to plan a trip on a map. If your list came from a chatbot, mapping a ChatGPT itinerary walks through pinning and checking those places.

7. Check opening hours the day before.

   Hours are stored for 371 of the 545 Brussels cards, and for 23 of the 39 sights in the ring, so 16 sights have none. A card shows whether a place is open where hours are known, but hours change, so confirm on the place's own page before you travel.

Worked example: 39 Brussels sights, 15 kept

I ran steps 1 to 4 on the Brussels deck. The first table shows how many cards survive each rule. The second lists the 15 sights that passed.

All 15 have opening hours stored. Two cards have similar names, Illusiemuseum Brussel and Museum of Illusions Brussels, and I did not check whether they are the same venue, so check before you save both. The list is a shortlist to react to, not a ranking of what is best. A filter on numbers cannot know that you care about comics but not military history.

Questions about finding things to do

How do I find things to do in a new city quickly?

Pick a centre point and a radius, separate sights from food and hotels, read rating and review count together, check unrated places by name, and save only the clear yes answers. Then look at the saved places on a map.

Is a high rating enough to pick a place?

No. In the Brussels data I read, 81 of 409 rated cards were at 4.5 or higher, and 28 of those had fewer than 100 reviews. Eight cards were rated 5.0 and seven of those had fewer than 20 reviews, so a rating from a handful of reviews tells you little.

Why can a famous place be missing from a ranked list?

Some places have no stored rating. The Atomium card in the Brussels data has none, so any filter on rating would drop it. Check unrated places by name before you cut.

How many reviews should a place have before I trust its rating?

There is no standard number. I use 100 as a first-pass line, which is my own rule. In the Brussels data the median rated card had 392 reviews, so 100 is a low bar there.

Is NomadSwipe available on iPhone?

Not yet. NomadSwipe is Android only today, on Google Play, and iPhone is coming soon.

Findings, method and sample

Sample and method. I read the NomadSwipe app's place data on 4 November 2026 with read-only queries. The destination named Brussels holds 545 cards, with 536 distinct normalized titles, so a few places appear twice. A separate destination named City of Brussels holds 17 more cards, which I left out. The stored rows were all last updated on 9 May 2026, so ratings and review counts are a snapshot. I measured straight-line distance from the Grand-Place at 50.8467 N, 4.3525 E, the coordinates Wikipedia gives for it. I counted a card as a sight when its stored type is museum, tourist attraction, park, garden, zoo or historical site. The 3 km radius, the 4.0 rating line and the 100-review line are my own choices.

• 409 of 545 cards (75%) have a stored rating. The median is 4.1 and the mean is 4.09. 280 are 4.0 or higher and 81 are 4.5 or higher.
• Review counts are skewed: among rated cards the 25th percentile is 116 reviews, the median is 392, the 75th percentile is 1,543 and the maximum is 43,752. 64 rated cards have fewer than 50 reviews.
• 28 of the 81 cards rated 4.5 or higher have fewer than 100 reviews, and 19 have fewer than 50. Of the eight cards rated 5.0, seven have fewer than 20 reviews.
• Rating and review count point in different directions. Among the 24 rated sights in the ring, the three highest-rated have 75, 859 and 152 reviews, and none of them is among the ten most reviewed. The three most reviewed are Manneken Pis (16,937 reviews, rated 3.3), the Musical Instruments Museum (4,150, rated 4.4) and the Parlamentarium (3,555, rated 4.2).
• In the ring, 15 of 39 sights have no stored rating. 19 of the 28 tourist-attraction cards in the whole deck are unrated, and so are the Atomium, Leopold Park and Parc de Forest.
• The deck is mostly not sights. In the 3 km ring, 143 cards are restaurants, 73 are hotels and 39 are sights, and 25 cards in the whole deck are more than 50 km from the centre.
• Price level is empty on all 545 cards, so this guide says nothing about cost.

Limits: this is one city, so another deck may behave differently. I did not copy any third-party review text. Ratings and review counts are stored values from 9 May 2026 and may have changed. Hours exist for 371 of 545 cards and I did not check them against the places' own pages. Not every place in Brussels is in the deck.

Related guides: Athens two day itinerary, what to do in Lisbon in 2 days, the printable travel itinerary template, a swipe travel app for Android and trip planning apps with a map.

Sources

• Place data: the NomadSwipe app's Brussels destination (titles, stored types, ratings, review counts, coordinates and hours as stored), read 4 November 2026.
• Wikipedia, Grand-Place (coordinates 50.84667 N, 4.35250 E): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand-Place (read 4 November 2026)
• Wikipedia, Atomium (built 1956 to 1958 for Expo 58, 102 metres tall): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomium (read 4 November 2026)