How We Research Our Travel Guides

Three things, in this order. Official and primary sources for anything with a rule or a number attached — immigration departments, operators’ own sites, published tariffs. A Google Places dataset we pull ourselves for restaurants, cafés, coworking spaces and surf schools, which gives us ratings and review counts across every business in an area rather than the handful someone remembered. And published writing by people who live there, cited by name when we lean on it.

Where those three disagree, we say so on the page rather than picking the tidiest version.

We have not eaten at every restaurant on these pages, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Nobody on this team lives in these places full-time. A guide that claims personal experience it does not have is worth less than one that shows its sources, so that is the trade we have made.

What we do bring is the surf side. This site has spent years on surf schools, breaks and conditions, and that is the lens the destination coverage is written through — which waves suit which level, when the season actually works, and what a beginner should avoid.

The dataset does the filtering, then we do the judging. Anything under a 4.0 rating or with fewer than 40 reviews comes out automatically, along with anything flagged closed. That leaves a shortlist far too long to publish, so we cut it to the entries worth a traveller’s time and write a line on each explaining why it is there.

No business pays to appear, and no business can pay to be removed. If a place is popular but overrated, the honest note is the one that says so.

Google ratings drift and businesses close — a rating with no date on it is a claim about the present that nobody has checked. Ours are a snapshot, so the page tells you when the snapshot was taken and we re-pull before republishing.

The same applies to prices. Costs here move with the exchange rate and the season, so we show the currency the price is actually charged in and note when we last checked.

Every number on a travel page is one of two things: cited, with a numbered source at the foot of the page and the date we read it, or explicitly marked as an estimate with a note on what it is based on.

There is no third category. Our publishing setup refuses to render a number that is neither, which is a deliberately annoying constraint we put on ourselves — it is the only way a guide about places we do not live in stays honest as it grows.

Photos of places (a coastline, a break, a town) are openly licensed pictures from Wikimedia Commons or Unsplash, credited under each one with the photographer's name and linked to the original. We only use one after checking its description, categories and location against the place it's standing in for.

We don't use AI-generated or stock images of named places. A made-up picture of Uluwatu could show a sandy beach where the real break is shallow reef, which is exactly the kind of mistake these guides exist to avoid. Photos of a specific business only appear if the owner sent them and gave us permission.

Some links to eSIMs, insurance, stays and tours earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Those links are labelled, and the disclosure sits next to them rather than buried at the bottom of the page.

Commission never determines what gets recommended or how anything is ranked. The restaurant lists carry no affiliate links at all — there is no commission on a warung, which is rather the point.

Prices change, places close, and rules get rewritten with no notice. If something here is out of date or simply wrong, tell us and we will fix it and re-date the page.