The Ithaka desk

Ithaka is written and edited in-house. 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. 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. Where something has not been verified, the page says so rather than repeating a claim we cannot stand behind.