Editorial Standards & Ethics
Accuracy first, speed second
Travel publishing rewards speed: the first site to post a fare gets the clicks, and the fare may be gone in hours. We feel that pressure every day and we have a standing answer to it. Nothing goes up unverified, ever, and if verification makes us second or fifth to a story, we are second or fifth. A deal post that sends a thousand readers to a price that never existed is not journalism, it is noise with a headline, and it spends trust we cannot buy back. The mechanics of verification, fare by fare and rule by rule, live on the fact-checking page; this page covers the ethics around them.
How deals are found, and what we will not call a deal
Our deals come from fare monitoring tools, airline and hotel sales, error fares, reader tips and plain manual searching. Every one is tested in a live booking search by an editor before publication, with the working dates and booking path spelled out in the post. We publish a fare because it is genuinely cheap against the route’s normal price, and for no other reason. We do not call an ordinary price a deal to feed an affiliate link, we do not inflate a strike-through price to make a discount look bigger, and we do not post a fare we could not get to price out ourselves. When a deal dies, the post is marked expired rather than left to catch readers, as the corrections policy describes.
No junkets for coverage
The travel industry runs on hosted trips: flights, rooms and tours offered to press in the expectation of coverage. Our rule is that coverage is never for sale, and never for barter. We do not accept free or discounted travel in exchange for a story, a review, or a kind adjective. Where the site pays for travel, it pays the public price the reader would pay, and books the way a reader would book, because arriving as an anonymous paying customer is the only way to review the experience the reader will actually have.
If we ever accept access that money cannot buy at all, such as a preview of an unopened property or a seat on an inaugural flight, the resulting piece discloses the arrangement in the text, prominently, and carries no review verdict, because a hosted experience cannot be scored honestly. What can be bought with a boarding pass is coverage of the fact; what cannot be bought at any price is the opinion of this site.
Gear reviews: how the products arrive and where they go
Gear we review is bought at retail wherever feasible. When a manufacturer provides a sample, the piece says so, the sample is returned or donated where practical, and the provision buys no verdict: samples get the same drop tests, the same packing cycles and the same right to a bad review as anything we paid for. We do not accept payment for reviews, we do not send drafts to manufacturers for approval, and we do not soften scores for advertisers. A review here reflects use, not unboxing: if we have not carried it, packed it, or worn it, we say we are reporting specifications rather than experience.
The wall between money and copy
The site earns from advertising and affiliate commissions, disclosed in full on the ownership and funding page. The wall works like this. Editors choose what to cover and what to recommend with no reference to commission rates, and the affiliate link is attached after the recommendation exists, not before. Advertisers do not see coverage in advance, do not know what is coming, and have no channel into editorial decisions; the things their money cannot buy are itemised on the advertise page. Sponsored content, when it runs, is labelled as sponsored at the top in plain language, is visually distinct, and is never written by the editors who write coverage of the same category.
Attribution and sourcing
Facts on this site are attributed. Fares cite the booking source and the date checked. Visa and entry rules cite the government, embassy or carrier source. News stories name where information came from, and when we build on another publication’s reporting, we say so and link them, because taking a competitor’s work without credit is theft with extra steps. We use unnamed sources rarely and only when the information matters and the source has a real reason to fear being named; an editor must always know who the source is, and the story says what we can about why the name is withheld.
Right of reply
When we report critically on a named company, an airline, a hotel, a tour operator, a gear brand, we ask them for comment before publication and give them reasonable time to answer. Their answer, or their silence, goes in the story. A review is judgment and does not require pre-publication comment, but factual claims inside a review are held to the same standard as news, and a company that disputes one gets the corrections process like anyone else.
Plagiarism, fabrication and AI
Plagiarism and fabrication end a writing relationship with this site, first offence, no appeals. Every word published under our name is the work of the person who filed it. On artificial intelligence: we may use software tools for research assistance, transcription and translation, and our fare monitoring is automated by nature, but published text is written, verified and edited by humans, and responsibility for every published claim sits with the editors, never with a tool. We do not publish AI-generated articles dressed as reporting, and AI-generated images are not used where a reader could mistake them for photographs of a real place.
The team, and how to argue with us
TRAVELHIFI publishes as a small independent team of editors rather than under individual bylines, and this page is the contract every member works under. Publishing as a team does not dilute accountability; it concentrates it, because the site’s name is the only name on everything. If we have fallen short of anything on this page, say so: support@travelhifi.com, and the mail will be read by an editor who is bound by this document and knows it. Standards that cannot be challenged from outside are decoration, and this page is not decoration.
