How we verify our guides
Most airport-transit content on the internet is wrong in ways that cost travellers real money: fares from three price rises ago, buses that were retired years back, trains that were never built. We know because we found exactly those errors in our own early drafts — and rebuilt our process around eliminating them. This page explains how a TravelOpsHQ guide gets made and what our verification line actually means.
Every claim traces to an official source
Each of our 50 transit guides carries a line under the byline: "Fares and service details checked July 2026 against …" with links to the sources used. Those sources are the transit operators and airports themselves — TfL, ÖBB, MTA, BART, Changi Airport Group, Kenya Railways timetable PDFs — not other travel blogs. If an official source and a popular blog disagree, we go with the operator, and if we can't confirm something officially, we either say so in the guide or leave it out.
Full re-verification, not spot checks
In July 2026 we re-verified all 50 guides end-to-end: every fare, every journey time, every service pattern, every "last train" time. Where the facts had moved, we fixed the guide and the publication record shows it. This wasn't cosmetic — the sweep caught retired bus routes, renamed lines, terminal closures, and fare changes of 20% or more, and every one was corrected against the operator's current published information.
Route diagrams are generated from the verified data
The fare diagram at the top of each guide isn't an illustration — it's rendered from a structured data file of lines, stops, fares, and journey times that is itself sourced from the verified guide text. Stop counts only appear when we could confirm them from the operator's own station lists or timetables; where a service's stopping pattern varies too much to state a single honest number, we don't print one. The same discipline applies to the road labels on taxi and bus routes.
Service disruptions get dated advisories
When a major, long-running disruption affects a route — like Vienna's 2026–27 Stammstrecke rebuild — we add a dated advisory to the guide with links to the operator's own notice, rather than silently rewriting history or leaving stale information up.
How we use AI — and where humans come in
We use AI tools to draft, structure, and cross-check our guides at scale — that's what makes 50-city coverage possible for a small operations team. What AI does not get to do is decide what's true: fares, times, and service patterns must trace to an official operator source before they ship, and the verification pass reviews the actual published pages, not a model's memory. The operational judgment — which option we'd actually pick with two suitcases at 1 a.m., which scams to warn you about — comes from 25+ years of travel-operations experience.
Found an error?
If a fare or schedule on this site doesn't match what you find on the ground, we want to know. Tell us via the contact page and we'll check it against the operator and correct the guide — corrections ship the same week they're confirmed.