Last updated: 9 September 2026
We write guides to places and link to the companies that sell flights, rooms and tickets. Those links pay for the site. This page explains exactly how — and how our guides and statistics are actually made — because you should be able to judge our advice knowing where the money comes from and how much of the work was done by a machine.
Most outbound booking links are affiliate links. If you book after clicking one, the airline, hotel or booking site pays us a percentage. You pay the same price you would have paid going direct. Commission rates differ between partners, and we do not order destinations, hotels or airports by what pays best. Where two options are close, we say so and let the price and the distance decide.
We currently earn from accommodation, flights, airport parking, cruises and tickets, through affiliate networks including CJ and Awin and through travel partners such as Travelpayouts. Some pages carry no monetised links at all.
This is the part most sites leave out, so we will be blunt about it. We have not visited most of the places we cover. Travel Wiki describes more than 118,000 cities in 252 countries; no one has been to all of them, and anyone claiming otherwise is not telling you the truth. Our guides are compiled from public reference sources — principally Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and the GeoNames geographical database — and drafted with AI assistance, then checked against those sources before publishing. Every guide page says this on the page itself.
What that gets you is breadth and consistency: the same questions answered for a small city as for a capital. What it does not get you is a reporter who ate at the restaurant. For anything your trip genuinely depends on — opening hours, prices, visa and entry rules, whether a route still runs — check the operator or an official source. We say this on every guide, and we mean it.
Where a place has no trustworthy source behind it, we publish a short factual stub rather than an invented description. An empty page is better than a confident wrong one.
Several parts of the site are computed rather than written. Here is what each number actually is.
Temperature, rainfall and the seasonal advice built on them come from the Open-Meteo historical weather archive, averaged over the last ten complete calendar years for the city’s own coordinates. The current year is excluded on purpose: the archive lags by a few days, so including it would average a partial year against full ones. These are historical averages, not a forecast. A ten-year average cannot tell you whether it will rain on your trip.
Where we rank or order cities, popularity means Wikipedia pageviews over the last twelve months, not population. Population is the wrong measure for a travel guide: Venice has about 51,000 residents and never enters an Italian population top eight, yet a year of human traffic on Wikipedia puts it third in Italy — ahead of Naples and Turin. Pageview counts exclude known bots.
Matching a city to its Wikipedia article is the hard part, and we do it by geography rather than by name: a candidate article is accepted only when the article’s own coordinates fall close to the city we hold. That is why Paris, Texas does not inherit the article for Paris, France.
Fares and price bands come from our flight data partners as live or recently-observed prices for a route, cached briefly and refreshed. They are observations, not quotes: airline pricing changes by the hour, and a price we showed an hour ago may not exist now. Every fare links through to the partner’s own search, which is the only authoritative price. Where we show a typical band for a month, it is derived from observed prices for that route, not a prediction of what you will pay.
The relative month-by-month pattern in our hotel study is computed from nightly rates in Google Hotels results, obtained through SerpApi. That derived shape — twelve relative levels per city, no listings, no absolute prices — is the only hotel data we store, and it contains no Stay22 data at all.
The live room prices you see when you click a month come from Stay22, fetched at the moment you ask and shown for immediate use, exactly as their terms intend: we do not store them, analyse them, or alter their booking links. Cached for at most thirty minutes in memory, then gone. Every booking link is Stay22’s own tracked link — a paid partnership, at no extra cost to you.
Hotel and travel offers in the deals strip come from partner networks with the advertiser’s own end dates, refreshed daily. An offer that has expired at the retailer can still briefly appear here; the retailer’s page is the truth.
Tell us when we get something wrong and we will fix it. Email editorial@travelwiki.online with the page and what is wrong. Press, tourism boards and affiliate managers: same address — but understand that we do not accept payment for coverage or for a place in a ranking.
See also our editorial standards, disclaimer and privacy policy.