How this site is written
Travel advice is easy to fake. This page exists so you can judge for yourself how much to trust anything else on the site — where our information comes from, where we have actually been, how we make money, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Some of what is here comes from months of actually living in a place. Our Da Nang coverage and the Crowne Plaza Da Nang review are first-hand, written from an extended stay, and the Crowne Plaza review and the Da Nang coffee guide carry our own photographs rather than stock images. The Bangkok hotel reviews — the Grand Hyatt Erawan, the Hyatt Place Sukhumvit 24 and the Staybridge Suites — are written from stays we actually took.
Other guides cover places we have not lived in. Those are researched from primary sources — official tourism boards, airline and hotel policy pages, and government advice — and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
The thinking behind this site is set out at length in The Travel Lie, available in paperback and on Kindle. If you want to know what we actually believe about travel and money, that is the long version.
Where our numbers come from
Prices, exchange rates, visa rules and airline policies change constantly, and any travel site that pretends otherwise is selling you something. Our approach:
- Costs are illustrative, not quotes. The calculators on this site are built to show you the shape of the maths, not to promise a price. They say so on the page.
- Rules come from the body that makes them. Where we describe a visa requirement, a compensation scheme or a baggage policy, the source we use is the government, regulator or airline that sets it — not another travel blog.
- Anything perishable gets a caveat. Every article carries a note telling you to confirm current specifics before you book. That is not a legal formality. It is the single most useful sentence on the page.
- We would rather publish nothing than publish a rewritten press release.
How we make money
Affiliate links. When you buy or book through certain links here, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Every one of those links is marked as sponsored in the page code, and the articles that contain them say so at the bottom.
If something is not worth your money we will say so, commission or not. A recommendation you cannot trust is worth nothing to you and, in the long run, nothing to us either.
We also sell our own book. That is the one thing on this site where our interest is obvious, so we would rather point it out than have you notice it yourself.
When we get it wrong
We will. A hotel changes hands, a route closes, a rule we described accurately in July stops being true in November. When that happens we would genuinely like to know.
Tell us through the contact details on our About page. Corrections to anything factual get made to the article itself rather than buried in a note, and the last-updated date on the page changes when the content does.
What we do not do
- We do not invent statistics, and we do not quote a number we cannot point to a source for.
- We do not describe a hotel, restaurant or city as if we have been there when we have not.
- We do not use fake urgency, fake scarcity or fake social proof.
- We do not give medical, financial or legal advice. Where an article touches medical tourism or money, it says plainly that we are not clinicians or advisers and that you should talk to someone who is.