How we verify

The small green-dotted plate that reads Verified · Month Year means one thing: the figures next to it were re-checked against operator or official sources on that date. The date always comes from the data itself — it is stored with the record that was checked, never typed onto the page — so it can go stale honestly instead of looking fresh. It is a claim about figures, not a safety rating and not an endorsement of any company.

Every published route is researched per city pair and per mode — a flight, a bus and a rental-car drive between the same two cities are three separate verifications. For each one we check operator timetables and official sources, and publish:

• Door-to-door durations, not vehicle time: city-centre transfers at both ends and a 90-minute airport buffer are included for flights.
• Fares as ranges — one-way economy prices observed two to four weeks out on the check date, converted at the Turkish central bank's published rate for that day. Never live prices.
• Both directions separately. Schedules are often asymmetric — a return flight can be longer, later, or rarer than the outbound — so the reverse direction is checked on its own, not assumed.

Behind each entry sits a dated source list and a confidence note recording what could not be pinned down — a winter schedule an operator has not published, a fare only one carrier shows. That uncertainty stays attached to the research; what reaches the page is only what survived it.

A route whose figures have not been independently verified does not get a page — no URL, no sitemap entry, nothing for a search engine to rank. If you search a corridor we have mapped but not yet verified, the site says so in place, labels the figures as an estimate, and leaves it at that. The same rule holds everywhere: places without a usable photograph, fares below our confidence bar, and partner offers without a live link are not shown as placeholders. They are simply not there yet.

Where a booking partner's price appears on a card, it is stamped with the date we checked it — and it retires itself: a partner price older than sixty days is automatically withheld from the page until it is re-checked. A stale price is worse than no price, so the code enforces the expiry rather than trusting anyone to remember it.

Places follow a two-tier rule. A place earns its own page only when it has been researched deeply enough to stand one — primary sources for its history, checked practical details, a properly licensed photograph. Everything else may appear as a brief record on a city page, but it never gets a URL of its own. Walking times between places come from a measured street-network matrix, not straight lines on a map, and are printed only when the measurement covers the pair and the walk is under forty minutes.

Safety notes and entry guidance cite government sources — travel advisories, official entry rules — and are written with their date ("as of …"), because this is the one category where our stamp is explicitly not enough: the page itself tells you to check your own government's current guidance before booking. Neighbourhood recommendations for where to stay exist only for the cities where the research met our bar, each one carrying its own "worth knowing" caveat; candidates with weak sourcing were dropped, not hedged.

Research starts wide, and AI research tools are part of that first pass — they draft, compare sources and flag contradictions faster than a person can. They do not decide what is published. Every figure that survives to a page was checked against a primary source before sign-off. Photographs are Wikimedia Commons works used under their licences, with the credit and licence under every image.

Found something that has moved — a fare, a closure, a schedule? Write to us via the contact page. Corrections are made on the page itself, and the stamp's date moves with them. More about who runs the site and how it is paid for is on the about page.