Fact-Checking Policy
What happens before a story goes up
Every publishable claim on TRAVELHIFI falls into one of three buckets: prices, rules, and everything else. Each has its own check, and the check happens before publication, not after the complaints arrive. The writer verifies while writing; an editor re-verifies the load-bearing facts before the piece goes live; and the piece records what was checked and when, so readers can see the freshness of what they are reading. Speed pressure is real in this niche and the answer to it is fixed: a story that cannot be verified today is a story that publishes tomorrow.
Fares and prices: it must price out, or it does not publish
A fare is verified in exactly one way: an editor runs the search and watches the price appear on a live booking page, on the airline’s own site or a bookable agency, close enough to the payment step to be real. Screenshots from other sites, alerts from monitoring tools and reader tips are leads, not verification. The published post records the route, the travel dates that produced the price, the booking source and the time of the check, because a fare without dates and a timestamp is a rumour. Hotel rates and gear prices follow the same rule at appropriate strength: seen live, dated, and linked to where we saw them.
Visa and entry rules: primary sources only
Nothing on this site puts a reader at risk faster than a wrong entry rule, so the sourcing bar is highest here. A visa or entry claim is checked against a primary source before publication: the official immigration or foreign ministry site of the country concerned, its embassy or consulate notices, or the industry databases airlines themselves use to decide who boards. Blog posts, forums and other publications are never sufficient sources for an entry rule, however confidently written. Where official sources disagree with each other, which happens more often than travellers would hope, we say so in the story and tell readers which authority to confirm with for their specific passport. Every entry-rule story carries the date we checked, and the guide-update process on the corrections page exists mostly for this category.
Safety advisories: named issuer, dated text
Safety coverage reports what official advisories say, and an advisory is a document, not a vibe. We name the government that issued it, quote or accurately summarise its current level and wording, link the original, and date our reading of it. Advisories from different governments about the same destination frequently differ, and where the difference matters we report it rather than flattening it. We do not dramatise advisories for traffic and we do not soften them for tourism appeal; both are lies with different customers.
Primary sources, and what counts as one
Across all coverage, a primary source is the party whose statement creates the fact: the airline for its own routes, fees and policies; the government for its own rules and advisories; the manufacturer for specifications; the operator for schedules. A screenshot of someone else’s article is not a source. A wire story is a lead to chase to its origin. Where a fact comes to us second-hand and the primary source cannot be reached in time, the story says who said it and that we could not independently confirm it, or the fact waits.
Links, so you can check us instead of trusting us
Our stories link their sources: the booking page, the embassy notice, the advisory, the announcement. This is deliberate self-exposure. A reader who can reach the primary source in one click can catch our mistakes, and readers who catch mistakes are the cheapest and most honest quality control a small team can have. If you follow a link and find the source now says something different, that is not embarrassing to us, that is the system working: mail support@travelhifi.com with CORRECTION in the subject and the story gets updated.
Reader tips, screenshots and what people send us
Reader-submitted deals and rule reports are treated as leads with exactly zero verification credit, however plausible they look. A fare tip is retested in a live search before it publishes. A report that a border is applying a rule differently from the official text is valuable precisely because it diverges from the official text, and it is published only as what it is: a dated, first-hand account, attributed as specifically as the source’s safety allows, alongside the official position. Photographs and screenshots sent to us are checked for signs of manipulation and for the oldest failure mode on the internet, the real image with the wrong date attached.
Numbers, studies and surveys
Travel is full of soft statistics: the cheapest day to book, average airfare trends, passenger satisfaction rankings. Before we cite a study or survey, we look at who paid for it, what was actually measured, and the size and source of the sample, and the story carries those caveats where they change the meaning. A survey commissioned by a booking site that concludes people should book through booking sites gets named as such or does not get cited at all.
When a check fails after publication
Verification does not end at publication, because travel facts rot. Live deal posts are retested on a schedule and marked expired when they die. High-traffic visa and entry guides are re-checked against their primary sources on a recurring cycle and after any relevant news event, and each carries its last-checked date. When any check fails, when the fare is dead, the rule has changed, or the original story was simply wrong, the corrections policy takes over, and the failure is logged so the process that missed it can be fixed too.
