Every guide here answers one question: what is actually worth your time in a given place? We answer it with data first — the places real visitors rate most — and then say plainly which parts are our own judgement, where each photograph came from, and when the page was last checked.
What we publish
- 259published guides, from a single city’s best days out to global record countdowns
- 5,917individual places pinned on a map and written up by hand
- 81states, territories and countries covered — 52 across the United States and 29 beyond it
- 149of those guides have been back through a dated verification pass
Everything on the site is one of three kinds of page, and each is built a different way:
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Destination guides
The best things to do in a city, a state or a country — ordered by how many real visitors have reviewed each place, and plotted on an interactive map you can pan through before you go.
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Record countdowns
The tallest, the fastest, the deepest, worldwide. Ranked by one measured figure rather than by opinion, with the number and what it measures shown for every entry.
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Facts pages
Sourced trivia about a single place, where every claim is checked against a primary source and cited on the page itself, so you can follow any of them back.
How our lists are ranked
Our “best things to do” lists are not personal opinion dressed up as fact. Each guide starts from a data-led shortlist, and we rank candidates primarily by the volume of real visitor reviews a place has already earned rather than by editorial preference. Category limits and floors stop any one kind of attraction — museums, parks, restaurants — crowding out a balanced itinerary.
Alongside the ranking we hand-pick a small editor’s choice set: the places most distinctive to a destination, however they happen to rank on review volume. Those picks are labelled where they appear, so you always know which part of a guide is data and which part is judgement.
Our record countdowns leave judgement out altogether. Each entry is ordered by a single measured figure — a height, a speed, a depth — and the page prints that figure and what it measures beside every entry, so the order is one you can check rather than one you have to take our word for.
No business can pay to be listed, to rank higher, or to have a rival left out. No entry on this site is sponsored or a paid placement, and we carry no advertising inside our guides. Our editorial guidelines set out the full method, including how we source and licence every photograph.
Who writes our guides
Our guides are produced by a small editorial team of researchers, writers, proofreaders and editors, and every entry is edited to meet these standards before it goes live. We do not accept guest submissions, and nobody outside the organisation can place an entry or a link in a guide.
Editorial decisions — what makes a list, in what order, and what gets corrected — rest with our editors and with nobody outside the organisation. No destination, attraction or agency has any say in what we publish.
Where our photographs come from
Almost every image in our guides is a licensed or openly-licensed photograph — from Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons and openly-licensed Flickr — and carries a caption naming the photographer, the platform and, where the licence requires it, a link to the licence itself. We keep a private master record of the provenance and licence of every image on the site, and we do not publish a photograph we cannot attribute correctly.
A small number of images are illustrative rather than documentary: they carry the caption “Illustrative image” and no photographer credit, which is how you can tell one from a photograph of the place itself at a glance.
Because the photographs are licensed to us rather than owned by us, we cannot pass those rights on. If you need an image you have seen in a guide, its caption links to the original source and its licence.
How we keep guides accurate
Attractions close, prices change and seasons shift, so a travel guide is only useful if it is kept current. We re-check our published guides on a rolling basis. A verification pass confirms that every external link still resolves, that each named place is still open and has not closed, moved, been renamed or demolished, and that our superlative claims still hold. Each guide then carries a dated “Last verified” line, so you can see exactly how fresh that particular guide is rather than taking a general promise on trust.
That is not a claim we make in the abstract: 149 of our 259 published guides have already been through one of those passes and carry the date on the page. A guide we have not reached yet shows no verification date at all, rather than a reassuring one it has not earned.
Spotted something wrong? Please tell us. A correction from someone who knows a place first-hand outranks any data source we hold, and we ask for nothing in return for making one. Substantive corrections are made within a week, and the guide’s “Last verified” date is updated when they are.
Get in touch
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Readers
Questions, comments, and corrections to any guide.
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Tourism boards & press
Visitor bureaus, chambers of commerce and journalists — see our press page.