How we source these guides, and why it changes what we will tell you

This page exists because we removed a lot of content from this site, and it is fair to explain the standard that replaced it.

The method, in three steps

**One. Build candidates from mapped open data.** OpenStreetMap gives us the names of businesses in a region. That is all it gives us: a name and a location. It is a starting list, never a source.

**Two. Open and read each one's own website.** One at a time, recording the final URL after redirects, the date, and what the business says about itself. If a venue makes a claim, the claim is quoted in its own words rather than paraphrased into ours.

**Three. Cut anything that fails.** If the site is dead, or belongs to somebody else now, or does not confirm what other sources say about the business, it comes out.

What this stops us saying

**Opening hours a business has not published.** Third-party listings publish hours constantly and they were the least reliable category we tested. During Tuscany research, a mapped listing showed a Chianti restaurant open through the winter when the restaurant's own site says it shuts from December to February. A reader following the listing drives to a closed door.

**Prices we have not been given.** Until recently this site carried weekly villa rates, percentage premiums between destinations and staffing levels "typically" included at a given budget. None of it traced to anything. It has been removed, and the destination pages now carry bookable experiences with prices set by the operator instead.

**Ratings and awards without a link and a year.** Michelin stars change annually. An out-of-date star is a falsifiable error that takes a reader one search to catch.

What it costs

More than it sounds. Checking several hundred venue sites by hand across five destinations took considerably longer than writing the text around them, and the failure rates ran from 6 per cent in Tuscany to 32 per cent in Sri Lanka.

It also loses us content. Places that are almost certainly excellent get left out because their own site could not be reached, and we would rather name that gap than fill it.

Where it breaks down, and what we do then

In the Mani, in southern Greece, the method stopped working. The peninsula has 206 mapped eating and drinking places and 17 websites between them. There is nothing to check for 92 per cent of them.

The honest response was not to pretend otherwise. It was to say so, publish the number, and rebuild the advice around it: telephone numbers where a business publishes one, a scripted phone call for people with no Greek, and days planned so that a closed door does not ruin one.

Two things we still owe

**The stock photographs.** Several destination pages still use stock images that do not show the specific places they sit beside. That is on our list and it is tracked publicly.

**Dates on everything.** Venue entries in the books carry a checked date. The destination pages on this site do not yet, and they should.

If you find something on this site that does not hold up, we would rather know.