Standards

How we research these guides

What gets checked before a page goes up, the things we deliberately refuse to state as fact, and how to tell us when the ground has changed.

Maintained by the Halo Asia editorsPolicy last changed July 31, 2026[email protected]

A travel guide is only worth the trust you put in it, so here is the whole method, including the parts that are less flattering. Halo Asia does not send a correspondent to every city it writes about, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we do instead is check every claim against sources that are accountable for being right, write in ranges where the truth is a range, and leave out the numbers that go stale faster than we can update them.

What gets checked before a page goes up

Every destination page is built the same way. The facts that sit in the summary strip at the top, the season, the sensible length of a stay, the currency and the main language, are checked against the country's own tourism authority and, for the historic sites, against the UNESCO World Heritage listing. Anything about safety, closures, or conditions on the ground is checked against current government travel advice, which is revised far faster than any magazine can move.

The sources we lean on most:

Where two sources disagree, we say so in the guide or drop the claim entirely. A sentence we cannot stand behind is worth less than the space it takes up. The same rule applies to reader tips: a good tip from the road tells us where to look, it does not go straight onto the page as fact.

Rules, visas and borders, which we will not restate as fact

You will not find a visa length, a fee, or a border-crossing rule quoted as fact anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate. Entry rules depend on your passport, change with about a week's notice, and differ between an airport and a land crossing an hour away. A number copied here in June is a liability in September, and the cost of getting it wrong is your flight, not ours.

So the guides tell you that the rules move, what specifically to look up, and roughly when to look it up. Then they send you to the government that issues the visa and to your own foreign ministry. That is the only version of this advice that stays true.

Numbers we leave out on purpose

Precision that decays is worse than an honest range, so a few things are missing from these guides by choice:

  • Prices. No room rates, meal costs, or ticket prices in local currency. They move with the season, the exchange rate, and whether you booked on a Tuesday. Where money genuinely shapes a decision we describe it in relative terms, such as a base that costs more but saves you an hour of traffic each day.
  • Timetables. Ferry and train schedules change with the weather and the season. We tell you the route exists and roughly how long it takes, then send you to check the current departure at the station or the operator.
  • Weather promises. Seasons here are patterns, not guarantees. We give the months a pattern usually holds and name the risks, the northern burning haze, the late year floods on the central Vietnamese coast, typhoon season in the Philippines, rather than telling you a given week will be dry.
  • Invented signals. No star ratings, no review counts, no reader numbers, no best-of rankings assembled to look authoritative. If we have not measured something, we do not put a number on it.

How often we go back over a page

Every destination and guide page carries the date it was published and, once it has been revised, the date of the last update. Both are in the page's structured data too. An update date appears only after a page has actually been rewritten, so it is a record of a real revision rather than a timestamp nudged forward to look fresh.

The schedule we hold ourselves to is a full re-read of every destination page twice a year, with the seasonal guidance checked ahead of the two windows that matter most here, the cool dry stretch on the mainland and the mid-year dry window in the islands. Planning guides get the same treatment once a year. Anything time-sensitive, a site that closes for restoration or a route that stops running, is changed as soon as we can confirm it rather than being held for the next scheduled pass.

Who writes this

Halo Asia publishes under one byline, the Halo Asia editors. It is a shared byline for the people who research, write and check the site, not a person, and we would rather say that plainly than invent an author with a portrait and a backstory. Where the schema on this site names an author, it names the desk and the organization behind it, for the same reason.

The trade-off is real: you do not get a named individual to hold accountable. What you get instead is a single address that reaches whoever wrote the page, a policy of naming our sources rather than our credentials, and corrections applied to the page itself rather than buried in a footnote.

Who pays for this

Halo Asia is funded by the people who run it. There is no advertising on the site, no affiliate links, no sponsored destinations, no paid inclusion, and no commission from any hotel, airline, tour operator, or booking platform. Nobody has ever paid to be written about here, and no write-up has been withheld because someone did not.

The bill is small, a domain, static hosting, and time, which is exactly why the model works. If that ever changes, this section changes with it and says so before you read another word.

What we will not do

  • Take payment, in money or in kind, for coverage or for a better write-up.
  • Publish a claim we cannot trace back to a source we would be happy to name.
  • Handle a booking, a payment, or a reservation. We are a magazine, not an agent.
  • Run pop-ups, countdown timers, fake scarcity, or urgency of any kind.
  • Write about a place so vaguely that the guide would fit anywhere in the region.

Tell us what has changed on the ground

Readers who have just been somewhere know things we do not, and this is the fastest way the site gets better. If a season read wrong, a ferry stopped running, a temple started charging entry, or a neighborhood we recommended has changed character, tell us.

Corrections

Email [email protected] with the page you were reading, the line that looks wrong, and what you saw instead. A date helps enormously. We read everything, and while we cannot promise a reply to every message, corrections we can confirm get made to the page and the update date moves with them.

If you want to see the method in practice, start with thebest time to visit guide, which is the clearest example of writing in seasons instead of promises, then readabout the magazine.