How a place earns a spot, which sources we trust, how we use AI, and how we fix mistakes.
| Tier | Source | How we use it |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Government and official bodies: immigration and e-visa portals, embassies and consular advisories, national tourism boards, public health agencies (CDC, WHO), central banks, airport and rail operators. | Any claim about visas, entry rules, health, money, safety or transport must link to a Tier 1 source. |
| Tier 2 | Guest reviews on booking platforms, local-language reviews, resident forums and community groups, cost-of-living aggregators, established local press. | Where places rank and why. Always aggregated, never a single review; always dated. |
| Tier 3 | Other travel publications and blogs. | Background only. Never the sole basis for a recommendation. |
Wikipedia is never cited as a primary source. Statistics carry a link and a date. If we cannot source a number, we do not print it.
We use AI systems to draft initial summaries from source material, to translate and cluster local-language reviews, and to run sentiment analysis across large review sets. Every published guide is reviewed by a human editor who checks each factual claim against its source, removes anything unverifiable, and rewrites for accuracy and clarity. City recommendations are additionally checked by a named local contributor. AI does not decide what we recommend.
Visa rules, entry requirements, health requirements, safety, and prices. These are dated, linked to Tier 1 sources, and re-checked on every monthly refresh.
We earn commissions on some hotel, tour, insurance and eSIM bookings, and pages may carry display ads. Rankings are computed before any affiliate consideration and are not changed for commercial reasons. We accept no payment for placement, no free stays in exchange for coverage, and we mark any sponsored content as such. We have never published sponsored content.
Guides show a last-updated date. Hotel lists are refreshed monthly; places that close or fall below the bar are removed. If you spot an error, tell us. Corrections are made within 7 days and noted on the page.
Plain English, second person, specific. No superlatives we cannot back up. No invented anecdotes. If we have not been somewhere, we do not pretend we have.