What this page is

This is the standard every VoyageHacks guide is written and maintained against. It explains where our numbers come from, which sources we treat as authoritative, how we separate a verifiable fact from our own recommendation, and how you can get something corrected.

If a page on this site quotes a price, a baggage limit, a travel time or an entry rule, this page tells you how that figure was established.

Source hierarchy

We rank sources in four tiers and we use the highest tier that can actually answer the question.

Tier 1: primary and official. Government and embassy pages for visa and entry rules, transport authorities and railway operators for fares and timetables, airport authorities for terminal and transfer information, airlines for baggage rules and fees, national meteorological services for climate data, banks and card issuers for fees, manufacturers for product specifications, and the operator’s own site for an attraction’s hours and tickets. This is the default for every checkable claim.

Tier 2: institutional. Statistical offices, tourism boards, regulators and standards bodies, for example an aviation authority’s published rules on lithium batteries.

Tier 3: established publications and reference works. Used for context and cross-checking, not as the sole source for a number.

Tier 4: traveller and community reports. Used only for experiential detail that no official source publishes, such as how long a queue usually feels at a given hour, and always labelled as such.

We do not replace a useful Tier 4 observation with a Tier 1 link that does not actually answer the question. We also do not cite a source unless that source genuinely supports the specific claim next to it.

How specific categories are verified

  • Prices and fees. Checked against the provider’s own published price on the date shown on the page. Travel prices move, so we write them as approximate ranges and name the provider and the observation date rather than implying a fixed rate.
  • Flight fares. Treated as observed ranges for a route and season, never as a guaranteed price. Live fares always come from the booking site, not from us.
  • Baggage and cabin rules. Taken from the airline’s own current baggage page, including whether wheels and handles count toward the measurement.
  • Trains, buses and city transport. Taken from the operator or transport authority, including the fare product name, so you can find it again at the counter.
  • Airports and transfers. Route options, frequency and typical journey time come from the airport authority or the operating transport company. Journey times are typical door-to-door figures, not best-case.
  • Visas and entry rules. Government or embassy sources only, and always with the instruction to confirm for your own nationality before you book, because entry rules are nationality-specific and change without notice.
  • Weather and seasons. National meteorological services and published climate normals. A climate normal is an average over decades, not a forecast for your dates.
  • Opening hours and tickets. The operator’s own site, with the caveat that seasonal hours change.
  • Safety. Official government travel advisories, quoted as the advisory says it, with a link to the current version.
  • Hotels and neighbourhoods. Our area recommendations are editorial judgements about location, transport access and typical price level. They are not inspections, and we say so on the page.
  • Products. Compared on the manufacturer’s published specifications, measured against named external limits such as airline size or battery rules. We do not claim laboratory testing we did not run.

Facts and recommendations are different things

A fact on this site is something you can check at the source we name. A recommendation is our opinion about what is worth your money, and it carries the reasoning and the trade-off so you can disagree with it.

We avoid unqualified superlatives. When a page says “best”, it means best for a stated purpose, audience and budget, and the page says which. Where a claim cannot be defended with a method, we do not make it.

Some guides open with a short narrative scene to set up the question the article answers. Those passages are framing, not evidence. Every number you should act on appears in the quick answer, the tables, or the FAQ, where its source can be checked.

How our pages are produced

Guides are drafted with the help of AI writing tools and are checked against the sources named on the page before publication. Editorial responsibility for everything published here rests with the operator named in our imprint . We do not publish machine-generated text that has not been checked against a source, and we do not publish invented first-hand testing, fabricated reviews, invented statistics, or author credentials we do not hold.

Three different dates

Pages can show three dates, and they mean different things.

  • Published is when the guide first went live.
  • Updated is when the editorial content changed. It is derived from the actual revision history of the page, so it cannot be refreshed cosmetically to fake freshness.
  • Facts verified is when the checkable figures on that page, for example fees or plan prices, were last confirmed against the sources listed at the foot of the article.

A page without a “facts verified” date has not been through a formal figure-by-figure re-check, and its numbers should be treated as accurate at the time of writing.

Affiliate relationships

VoyageHacks is funded by affiliate commissions. If you book or buy through some of our links we may receive a commission at no extra cost to you, and every page carries that disclosure. Our partners are listed on our about and disclosure page .

Commercial relationships do not decide our rankings or our verdicts. We recommend options we do not earn from when they are the better answer, we say when the honest answer is that you do not need to buy anything, and we do not accept payment for placement, for a review, or for a specific rating.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, please tell us. That includes incorrect prices or fees, outdated transport or route information, changed opening hours, unrealistic travel times, superseded entry requirements, dead links and plain factual errors.

Email [email protected] with the page URL and, where possible, the source that shows the correct information. We correct confirmed errors in the page itself rather than in a footnote, and the revision shows up in that page’s “updated” date.

Review cadence

Pages that quote fees, plan prices or regulatory limits are re-checked when we are alerted to a change and on a recurring review cycle, and the “facts verified” date is only moved when the figures have actually been re-confirmed. Seasonal guides are reviewed before the season they cover. Everything else is corrected on report.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about how a specific figure on a specific page was established: [email protected] . Operator and legal details are in our imprint .