Editorial Standards

Every guide is written to the same standard: verifiable facts, named sources, and prices drawn from real inventory rather than estimates. If a claim cannot be traced to a source, it does not go on the page.

We do not write in the first person about places we have not been. A guide will never tell you what it was like to eat somewhere, or how a road felt to drive, unless a named editor actually did it and put their name to it.

We do not invent authors. Some travel sites publish guides under fictional bylines with invented biographies and photographs. We think that is dishonest, and we do not do it.

stay.cx is founder-led. Thijs van Oss, founder, oversees editorial standards and signs off every guide before it publishes.

Guides are credited to the stay.cx editorial team rather than to an individual, because that is an accurate description of how they are made. As named contributing editors join us, their names will appear on the guides they work on, alongside the date they reviewed them.

We use AI tooling to do the research legwork: reading timetables, statistics, official records and archives at a scale a small team could not cover by hand.

It does not publish anything on its own. Every guide is checked by an editor before it goes live, and that check covers the facts, the sources and the prices. Where a claim cannot be verified, it comes out.

We are not going to pretend this does not happen, and we are not going to lead with it either. What matters is whether the page is accurate, and accuracy is a human responsibility here.

The full process, including how we source facts, how prices are calculated and how often guides are reviewed, is on our “How we research our guides” page.