Every figure on this site — a fare, a temperature, a duty-free allowance, a holiday date — comes from a named source and carries the date it was last checked. This page explains the rules we apply.
Sources we accept
- The operator or the issuer. A train fare comes from the railway company’s own tariff or reservation system. A card deposit comes from the card issuer. A plan price comes from the provider’s published price list.
- The authority that decides. Entry requirements come from the immigration or foreign ministry portal of the country concerned. Customs allowances come from the customs administration.
- The national statistical or meteorological agency. Climate figures are 30-year normals published by the relevant national weather service, not an average of what a website felt like reporting.
- The published statute or regulation, where a rule is legal rather than commercial.
Sources we refuse
- Aggregator sites quoting other aggregator sites. If we cannot trace a number to its origin, we do not publish it.
- Forum posts and social media, except as a signal that something may have changed — never as the source of a published figure.
- Booking platforms quoting “from” prices, which are marketing, not tariffs.
- Our own memory or assumption. If we have not checked it, it does not go in a table.
How often we re-check
- Fares, pass prices and plan prices: at least every six months, and immediately when an operator announces a change.
- Entry rules and customs allowances: at least every six months, and immediately on any announced change. These change with no notice and are the highest-risk figures on the site.
- Holiday calendars: annually, as soon as the following year’s dates are gazetted.
- Climate normals: when the issuing agency publishes a new reference period.
The “Updated” date at the top of every guide is the date of the last verification pass, not the date we last edited a sentence.
How we handle prices
Prices are quoted in the local currency, because that is the figure you will actually be charged and the only one that does not go stale with the exchange rate. Where we give a conversion, we state the rate and the date used, and we round conservatively. Never plan a budget on our conversion — plan it on the local-currency figure and your own bank’s rate.
Estimates and ranges
Some questions have no single answer: how much cash to carry, how crowded a month feels. Where we give a range or a rating, we say what it is derived from — typical transaction values, visitor-arrival statistics, occupancy data — and we label it as an estimate rather than dressing it up as a measurement.
Use of AI tools
We use software, including AI assistants, to draft, restructure and proofread text, in the same way any publisher uses a word processor and a spell-checker. No figure reaches a published table because a language model produced it. Every number is checked against the primary source by a person before publication, and the source is named in the guide.
Photographs
The photographs on this site are licensed stock images, and a number of them are produced with an image model. They illustrate a subject; they never document a specific place, price or notice. Nothing on a photograph is evidence, and no figure in a guide rests on one — the numbers come from the sources named at the foot of each page. Captions describe what the picture shows and stop there, and where an image would have to invent a detail to be useful — a fare on a screen, the wording of a sign — we leave the detail out rather than fake it.
Independence
We take no payment for coverage, no payment for a ranking, and no payment for a link. The site is funded by display advertising, which is sold programmatically and has no connection to the content of a page. If that ever changes, this page changes first.