This page sets out how we research, what we will and will not publish, and what happens when we get something wrong. It is here so you can judge how much weight to put on anything else on this site.
Source hierarchy
We work down this order, and we stop as soon as we have a reliable answer.
1. The operator or authority itself. For Turkish state museums that is the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s museum portal and its published tariff. For rail it is TCDD. For weather it is the state meteorological service. For rules it is the Official Gazette or the relevant provincial governorship.
2. Intergovernmental bodies. UNESCO for World Heritage properties, IUCN for conservation status.
3. National press with a named source. Turkish and Japanese outlets reporting a figure and attributing it.
4. Everything else, treated as a lead to verify rather than as a source.
We do not promote a blog to the status of an official record because it was the only thing we could reach.
Confidence, and why some pages carry ratings
Some primary sources are genuinely hard to access. The Turkish Ministry’s master price tariff, in particular, has been unreachable from where we work.
When that happens we have three options: guess, copy what other sites say and present it as fact, or tell you what we know and how well we know it. We take the third.
That is why several pages carry an explicit confidence column:
- Ministry / official — the figure appears on the authority’s own page
- Corroborated — several independent sources agree, but we could not check the official record
- Single source — one source only, treat as indicative
If we could not establish something at all, we say that too, and we do not fill the gap with a plausible-looking number.
Dating
Every guide carries the month it was verified and, for anything priced, the exchange rate we used and its date.
Turkish prices in particular move fast. One train fare in our Pamukkale guide changed two days before we published it. A guide without a date is a guide you cannot assess.
First-hand experience
We do not invent it. Where a page describes doing something, it was done. Where our knowledge comes from research rather than presence, the writing gives you judgements, comparisons and verified figures instead of manufactured anecdotes.
We think readers can tell the difference, and we think the sites that pad guides with invented colour are borrowing credibility they have not earned.
Recommendations and money
Some links are affiliate links. If you book through one we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Commercial relationships do not influence what we recommend. No brand pays for placement, for a favourable write-up or for a ranking position. We regularly recommend the option that earns us nothing — public transport over private transfers, individual tickets over passes, free sites over ticketed ones — because that is frequently the right answer.
Our reference pages, including price lists and data pages, carry no affiliate links at all. Those pages exist to be accurate and citable, and commercial links would undermine both.
Corrections
When we get something wrong we fix it, we date the fix, and we say what was wrong. We do not silently edit and move on.
Two corrections we made in August 2026:
- We described İzmir’s public transport as distance-based. The core network — buses, metro, trams — is flat-fare; İZBAN and about twenty long-distance suburban routes are distance-based. We had the rule and the exception reversed.
- We wrote that UNESCO records bathing in Pamukkale’s pools as prohibited. The UNESCO text says the opposite — designated bathing areas have been established — and prohibits access to the *terraces*. We then built a paragraph around a contradiction that existed only in our misreading.
Both were caught in pre-publication review. We list them publicly because a site that claims other guides are stale should show its own record.
How to reach us
If you find an error, or you have a current price that differs from ours, or you know where a primary source we could not reach is published — tell us. Corrections from readers who were recently there are among the most useful things we get.
There is a contact page, and we read what arrives.
What we will not do
We will not publish invented first-hand experience. We will not present an unverified figure as confirmed. We will not recommend something because it pays better. We will not remove a correction to make an old article look cleaner.
If we ever do any of those things, the rest of this site is worthless, and so is this page.