How we write guides

What a guide has to do

Answer the question you actually typed, in the first paragraph. Then earn the rest of your attention with detail you cannot get from a search result — which station, which hour, what it costs, and what the catch is.

Three rules do most of the work:

• Specific beats general. Not "plenty of great food options" but the dish, the street and the time the queue starts. If a sentence names nothing, it gets cut.
• Every guide takes a side. Five options with no ranking is a brochure. Our guides say which one we would book and who should ignore that advice.
• Every guide tells you one thing to skip. The queue that is not worth it, the neighbourhood that photographs better than it sleeps. A guide that likes everything is not a guide.

Where the facts come from

Opening hours, fares, visa rules and prices are taken from official transit, tourism and government sources, current operator listings and local reporting — then written down with the date they were checked. That is why you will see "checked September 2026" next to a number rather than a confident figure with no provenance.

Prices move. A dated number you can sanity-check beats an undated one you have to trust, and when a guide is re-checked the date moves with it. If we could not verify something, it does not go in — an honest gap is better than a confident guess.

Who writes them

Guides are published under named curators, each responsible for a region or a discipline. A byline tells you which desk stands behind the research and who to hold to it. Bios describe that beat and the research standard — they are not travel résumés, and we do not decorate them with country counts or invented life stories.

For the same reason our guides make editorial judgements rather than personal claims. You will read "we would take the earlier boat, the light is better and the crowds are two hours behind you". You will not read a manufactured holiday memory. We would rather out-research a story than invent one.

Want to join them? We are open to contributors →

How the money works

Some links in a guide earn us a commission. It never changes what you pay, and it never changes what we say. That is not a slogan — it is the reason the recommendations and the bookable inventory are kept apart.

• Prose is not sponsored. No hotel, tour operator or tourism board pays to appear in a guide, and none of them see one before it is published.
• Hotel and experience shelves are live inventory, loaded when you open the page and priced by our partners, not by us. A guide never quotes a nightly rate in its own text, because that number would be stale within the day.
• An empty shelf stays empty. When a partner does not cover a destination, the guide says so instead of quietly substituting somewhere else.

The full list of who we work with is on the affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

Things change and we get things wrong. If a price has moved, a place has closed or a detail is off, tell us and we will fix it and move the checked-on date. Send us a correction →