This site is research, not reportage. That distinction shapes everything below.
What we publish
Every page exists to answer a decision: which to book, whether it’s worth it, what it costs, what you’re entitled to. If a page doesn’t help someone decide something, it doesn’t get written.
That rules out most of what fills travel sites: inspiration lists nobody acts on, rewritten encyclopaedia entries, and “ultimate guides” assembled from other people’s guides.
What we can and can’t claim
We are a desk. The research is done from primary sources, not from standing in the destination. We say so on the pages where it matters, and we never write in a way that implies otherwise.
So you will not find on this site:
- Invented hotel stays, or “when we visited” framing for places we haven’t been
- Stock photography presented as our own
- Made-up quotes, sample sizes, or test results
- A fictional masthead of writers
And you will find:
- Primary sources, linked. Regulations, conditions of carriage, rental terms, operator timetables and official tariffs, all cited so you can verify a claim without taking our word for it.
- Prices checked against live booking systems for specific dates and specific room or cabin types, with the month of checking shown.
- The arithmetic on the page. Where we claim a saving, the sums are visible.
- Explicit uncertainty. Where something varies, is disputed, or we simply don’t know, the page says that rather than smoothing it over.
How we rank things
Criteria are decided before we look at prices, and they’re stated on the page. For hotels: location relative to what you came for, real cost including fees, noise, and cancellation terms. For booking sites: total price after fees, refund policy, what happens when something goes wrong. For car hire: the deposit, the fuel policy, and what the desk is allowed to charge you.
Every ranking says who it’s for and who should choose differently. A single “best” with no “unless” is nearly always a lie.
On AI
AI tools are used here for research synthesis, drafting factual sections, structuring comparisons, and technical chores like alt text and schema markup.
They are not used for the verdict, the trade-offs, or the numbers. Every factual claim is checked against a primary source by a person before it publishes, and that person is responsible for it.
The line that matters isn’t whether a machine helped write a sentence. It’s whether anyone took responsibility for whether the sentence is true. Here, someone does.
Accuracy and corrections
Travel information rots faster than almost anything else. Fares move, routes close, rules change, hotels get sold.
- Pages carry the month their figures were last verified.
- That date changes only when the figures are genuinely re-checked. Bumping a date to look current is a lie about the one thing readers most need to trust.
- Corrections are made promptly. Where a correction changes the recommendation, it’s noted at the foot of the page with the date.
- Tell us if something’s wrong. Reader corrections are the fastest quality control available to a small operation.
Independence
Nothing on this site is reviewed or approved by anyone outside it. No merchant, airline, hotel or tourism board gets to preview, edit or veto a page.
We don’t currently accept press trips, comped stays, or paid placements. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the page in question, in plain language, at the top.
Money
The site currently carries no advertising and no affiliate links. When it does, the disclosure will appear on every affected page above the first link, and commission will never be a ranking criterion.
The full explanation lives at How we make money.