About
How we verify
Every place on this site carries one of two seals, and neither is decorative. This page says exactly what they mean, how we check, and what we do when we get something wrong.
The two seals
Someone from the team has been, in the month shown. They saw the room, paid the bill and checked the details against what the venue publishes. The date matters: a visit from three years ago is a historical note, not a verification.
Compiled from primary sources without a visit. Everything stated is backed by a source we name and a date we checked it on — but nobody has walked in the door, and we do not pretend otherwise.
A place with neither seal is labelled "In verification" — published so you can see what we are working on, and carrying no confirmed facts at all until it earns one of the two seals above. There is no fourth state and no "probably": a fact appears sourced, or it does not appear.
The order we check in
The official source
The venue's own site or booking system. Where it disagrees with an aggregator, it wins.
Maps, for distances and times
Walking times are measured, not estimated. "Ten minutes from the square" is a claim we check like any other.
Booking platforms and OTAs
Useful for policies and price bands, treated as secondary to the venue itself.
Recognised food and travel press
For context and reputation, never as the sole source for a fact.
Review platforms, for confirmation only
They can confirm that something changed. They cannot establish that it is true.
What the build refuses
These are not guidelines we try to follow. They are conditions the site fails to compile under, which is the only version of an editorial standard that survives a deadline:
- A published fact — an address, opening hours, a reservation policy, a price band, even the coordinates — with no source recorded against it, complete with the URL and the date it was checked.
- A place marked as visited without the month of the visit and at least one source.
- A fact stated on an "In verification" page. Those pages exist so the queue is public, and exactly because nothing on them is confirmed, the build refuses to let them state anything as fact.
- Coordinates that fall outside the city they claim to be in — which is how a transposed latitude and longitude gets caught before it strands anybody.
- An audience statistic without the analytics source that produced it.
The rule underneath all of them: a field we cannot confirm stays empty. An empty field renders nothing at all — no dash, no "unknown", no plausible guess. If a venue page here looks sparse, that is the protocol working, not an oversight.
When we get it wrong
Places change: kitchens close, policies tighten, a rooftop stops letting non-guests up. Anything we publish can be corrected, and a correction is a change to the source record, not a quiet edit. If something here is out of date, tell us on thesubmissions form and we will re-check it against the same order above.