About Spike Travel

What this is

Spike Travel started with a simple irritation. You search for a city, and the top results are either a list of twelve things to do that could have been written from orbit, or a booking site pretending to be a magazine. Neither tells you whether the tap water is fine, what a taxi from the airport actually costs this year, or which month the locals leave because the heat is unbearable.

So we write destination dossiers the way a good foreign correspondent would brief a friend. Every dossier has the same bones: when to go, month by month; what a day costs at three budgets; the entry rules for five passports with the official source and the date we checked; where to stay and which areas to skip; and a section called "What nobody tells you", which is the part most guides leave out because it is bad for business.

Around the dossiers sit guides, reviews, a news desk that follows border and airline rules, deals an editor would book, and a set of planning tools that run on the same verified numbers.

Who makes it

Spike Travel is owned by its founder and edited from wherever the next assignment is. There is no parent company, no venture investor and no tourism board on the cap table. The people who write and check pages are listed on the masthead, with their beats and how to reach them.

How it is funded

We earn money three ways, and we say so wherever it happens:

• Commissions. When you book a hotel, a tour, insurance or car hire through a labelled partner link, the partner pays us a small percentage. You pay the same price. Our affiliate disclosure lists every programme we belong to.
• Advertising. Display advertising, when it runs, is served by a network and marked as advertising. Advertisers do not know what we are writing and cannot buy a place in a dossier.
• Sponsored content. Rare, always labelled "Sponsored" at the top, and never in the dossiers, reviews or news.

What we do not sell: rankings, verdicts, inclusion in a list, or the removal of criticism. Our editorial standards spell out the rules, including what happens when a hotel offers a free stay.

Three promises

1. Every fact has a date. Prices, rules and hours change. Each page shows when an editor last verified them, and the sources sit at the bottom of the page.
2. The honest section is never cut. If a famous sight is a queue in the sun for a mediocre view, the dossier says so.
3. Mistakes get fixed in public. Material errors are corrected in place and logged on the corrections page. You can report one from any page.

Say hello

Questions, corrections and tips go through the contact page. Tourism boards, PR teams and fellow journalists should read how we work with press first.