Editorial Guidelines & AI Policy

How we make this site

There’s a lot of travel content on the internet. Most of it reads like it was written by someone who’s never left their desk. We’re trying to do something different here, and we think you deserve to know how.

This page explains how our content gets made, what standards we hold ourselves to, who’s actually writing these articles, and where AI fits into the process (spoiler: it’s a tool, not the author).

Who writes the content

Humans. Real ones. People who’ve actually been to the places we write about, stood in the queues, missed the trains, eaten the questionable street food, and figured out which neighbourhoods are worth your time and which ones aren’t.

Every article, guide, and itinerary on The Travel Tinker is written by a human. That means someone sat down, thought about what would actually be useful to you, and wrote it in their own words based on their own experiences and research. It’s not generated by software and lightly edited. It’s not a prompt fed into a chatbot and published. A person wrote it.

We’re a small team, not a content farm. That means we publish less frequently than sites that churn out 15 articles a week, but what we do publish is grounded in real experience and genuine research. We’d rather have 200 articles we’re proud of than 2,000 that say nothing.

Our editorial standards

Here’s what we expect from every piece of content before it goes live:

First-hand experience or thorough research. If we’ve been somewhere, we write from that experience. If we haven’t visited personally, we’re upfront about it and base the content on extensive research from credible sources, cross-referenced and verified. We don’t pretend we’ve been somewhere we haven’t.

Accuracy over speed. We’d rather delay publishing an article by a week than get a visa requirement wrong or quote an outdated exchange rate. Practical information (entry requirements, costs, transport options, opening hours) gets checked against official sources before we hit publish. And we go back and update it when things change.

Honest recommendations. If a place is overrated, we’ll say so. If a popular tourist attraction isn’t worth the entry fee, we’ll tell you. If a cheaper alternative exists, we’ll point you to it, even when the expensive option pays us a higher affiliate commission. Our recommendations are based on what we’d genuinely tell a friend, not what makes us the most money.

No filler.We don’t pad articles with 500 words of waffle before getting to the point. If you’re searching for the best time to visit somewhere, you shouldn’t have to scroll past someone’s life story to find the answer. Useful information first, always.

Prices in context. When we quote costs, we show them in GBP, USD, and EUR side by side so the information is useful regardless of where you’re reading from. For destinations outside the Eurozone, we include the local currency too. Exchange rates are checked at the time of writing and noted so you can see how current the figures are.

Clear affiliate disclosure. If an article contains affiliate links (and most of them do), we tell you right at the top. Not buried in the footer, not hidden in the terms and conditions. Right after the first paragraph. Full details are on our affiliate disclosure page.

How we use AI

Here’s the bit everyone’s curious about. And we’d rather be straightforward than vague.

AI does not write our articles.

We don’t use ChatGPT, Claude, or any other AI tool to generate articles, guides, reviews, or recommendations. The words you’re reading across this site were written by a human, not produced by a language model and tidied up afterwards.

That said, we’re not pretending AI doesn’t exist. We use it, just not for writing.

What we do use AI for:

Research assistance. When we’re planning a new article, AI tools can be useful for pulling together background information, identifying angles we might have missed, or checking whether our understanding of something is correct. It’s a starting point for our own research, not the finished product.

Brainstorming and structure. Sometimes we’ll bounce ideas off an AI tool when outlining an article. “What questions would a first-time visitor to Japan actually have?” is a useful prompt. But the answers, the writing, and the perspective all come from us.

Technical tasks. Things like generating FAQ schema markup, formatting code snippets for the site, checking meta description character counts, or troubleshooting a CSS issue. Back-end stuff that has nothing to do with the editorial content you read.

Data checking. If we need to verify a current exchange rate, check the status of a visa policy, or confirm whether a border entry system has launched yet, AI tools with web access can speed up that process. We still verify against official sources before publishing.

Proofreading. Occasionally we’ll run a draft through an AI tool to catch typos or awkward phrasing we’ve gone blind to after the fourth read-through. The same way you might use a spellchecker. The writing itself doesn’t change.

What we will never use AI for:

Writing articles or guides from scratch. Full stop.

Generating fake reviews or fabricated personal experiences. If we say “I walked this route” or “we stayed at this hotel,” a human actually did that.

Creating content designed to game search engines rather than help readers. Every article exists because we thought it would be useful to someone planning a trip, not because a keyword tool said we should write it.

Publishing AI-generated images as real travel photography. If we ever use AI-generated illustrations (which we currently don’t)

How we handle updates and corrections

Travel information changes constantly. Visa rules shift, airlines cancel routes, that restaurant you loved closes down, and entry fees go up every year. We try to keep on top of this, but with hundreds of pages on the site, some things inevitably go stale.

Here’s how we manage it:

Hub pages (our main destination guides) are reviewed and rebuilt on a rolling basis. When we rebuild a page, every fact, price, and practical detail gets rechecked from scratch.

Individual articles get updated when we become aware that something has changed, or when we revisit a destination. Updated articles show the most recent revision date.

If you spot something that’s wrong or out of date, please tell us. A quick message through the contact page saves someone else from getting bad information. We genuinely appreciate it.

A note on independence

We don’t accept payment from tourism boards, hotels, or tour companies in exchange for coverage. Nobody can buy a positive review or a featured spot in our guides. If we write about a place, it’s because we think it’s worth your time, not because someone’s PR agency sent us an email.

We do earn money through affiliate links (explained fully on our affiliate disclosure page). But the editorial decisions, the recommendations, what gets included and what gets left out, that’s entirely ours. The affiliate partnerships fund the site. They don’t influence what we write.

Questions

If you want to know more about how a specific article was researched, whether we’ve actually visited a destination we’ve written about, or anything else about how we work, just ask. We’re reachable through the contact page and happy to be transparent about all of it.