About Ithaka

Ithaka exists to answer the question that comes after the country. Somebody has decided on Thailand, or Bali, or Turkey, and now has to pick between Samui and Phangan and Tao, between Ao Nang and Railay, between Antalya and Fethiye - and almost everything written about those places is written to sell one of them. The pages here are written to choose between them, which means saying who a place does not suit as plainly as who it does.

Every destination gets its own page, and every page has to carry the things a choice actually turns on: how you get there and how long the boat or the transfer takes, what a night costs at the bottom and the top, and the months the sea is rough or the heat makes a day outdoors impossible. The comparison pages give a recommendation rather than a draw. Where two places are genuinely close, the page says so instead of inventing a difference.

Facts come from primary sources. Ferry and fast-boat times are checked against the operators rather than against aggregator listings, which go stale and keep selling cancelled routes. Sea state and monsoon timing come from the national meteorological services, not from a brochure’s ‘best time to visit’. Park and site access - Maya Bay’s quotas, the Goreme museum, the Grand Mosque’s dress and entry rules - is checked against the authority that sets it. Prices are given in baht, rupiah, lira and dirhams with the month they were checked. Anything numeric carries the date it was checked, because a price without a date is not information. Geographic data comes from GeoNames and OpenStreetMap, photographs from Wikimedia Commons under their individual Creative Commons licences, and time zone data from the IANA database.

We do not accept payment for a placement, a ranking or a favourable review. Where a link earns a commission, the page carrying it says so. We do not claim to have tested something we have not: plan details and prices that come from a provider rather than from our own checking are labelled as such. And we do not publish a page to fill a gap in a keyword list.

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. Email [email protected] with the page and what is inaccurate. Corrections to a specific fact are made on the page, and the update date on the page changes with them.