Editorial Standards

This is the standard the desk holds itself to. It is versioned; the current edition is v2026.1. Changes are recorded in the changelog at the foot of this page.

1. Independence

Urban Travel Review takes no press trips, no hosted stays, no comped meals offered in exchange for coverage, and no sponsored placements. We book under our own name and pay in full. No commercial relationship — of which we currently hold none — may influence a review, a ranking, or a Curb Score.

2. Sourcing

Every factual claim — a price, a date, an award, a specification, a transit time — is verified against a primary source at the time of writing and is expected to survive a reader checking it. Estimates are labelled as estimates. We do not publish a figure we cannot point to. Full detail in our methodology.

3. The house byline

We publish under one byline — the Urban Travel Review city desk — not under personal brands. Reporting is collective and the publication stands behind every page as one entity. We do this deliberately: it keeps the focus on the work, and it means accountability runs to the desk, not to a freelancer who has moved on. There are no contributor profiles and no personal social accounts.

4. Conflicts of interest

Editors recuse from covering any property, restaurant, or operator in which they, or someone close to them, hold a financial interest or personal relationship. Where a reviewed business later becomes a commercial contact of the publisher, prior reviews are flagged and re-checked by an editor with no involvement.

5. Anonymity and fairness

We review as ordinary paying guests, unannounced, so that what we experience is what you would. Before publishing a critical claim of fact about a named business, we put it to them for response and reflect it. Opinion is clearly opinion; fact is sourced.

6. Corrections

We correct errors of fact promptly and visibly. A correction is made on the page and logged, dated, in the corrections log. Where new information changes a verdict, we change the verdict and say so. Corrections to fixes@urbantravelreview.com.

7. AI and automation

We do not publish AI-generated reviews of places no editor has visited, and we never attribute a machine-written passage to the desk as first-hand reporting. We use software for the unglamorous parts — transcription, fact-checking against sources, copy-editing, building comparison tables from verified data, and generating illustrative imagery where no licensable photograph exists (labelled as such). The judgement, the visit, and the score are human.

8. What we will not publish

• Reviews of places no one on the desk has been to.
• Rankings shaped by who paid.
• Unverifiable statistics or invented quotes.
• Self-reported numbers from a business relaundered as our own measurement.

Changelog

• v2026.1 — Initial public edition of the standard for Crosstown Press LLC.