How we verify
Where the facts come from — and how we keep them honest
The best feel for a place often comes from someone who just went. So instead of only telling you what we found in our own research, we mine real travelers’ videos for the practical details — prices, drive times, what’s open when — and turn them into facts you can check. Every one is tied back to the moment it was said. Here’s exactly how that works, so you can trust what you read.
Every fact keeps the traveler’s own words
When we say a chalet ran RM 80–130 a night or the drive took three and a half hours, that’s not us paraphrasing — it’s pulled from a real moment in someone’s video, with the words they actually said kept alongside it. You can read the quote and decide for yourself whether it means what we say it means.
The timestamp is looked up, never typed
Each fact links to the exact second it was said in the original video. We don’t hand-type that timestamp — a script finds the quote inside the video’s captions and reads the real time back. If a quote can’t be located in the actual video, the fact is dropped. So a made-up quote or a wrong time simply can’t survive to the page.
A person approves every fact before it’s published
Software does the finding; a human does the deciding. Before any fact goes live, someone reads it next to its quote and the video, and approves, fixes or rejects it. Nothing reaches the site automatically — the machine never gets the final say.
We only call it “agreement” when travelers actually agree
The “What the trips agree on” boxes only appear when at least two different travelers said the same kind of thing — a consensus of one is just a single person’s quote, and we won’t dress it up as more. When trips disagree, we show that honestly too (the monsoon is great for surf but pauses the turtle activities — both are true).
We embed the videos — we don’t re-host or re-edit them
Videos play straight from their original platform, so the creators keep their views and their credit. We don’t download footage, re-upload it, or republish anyone’s transcript. Tap a timestamp and you’re watching the creator’s own video at that moment, on their channel.
What we don’t do
No invented prices, no “sounds about right” detail, no numbers an AI guessed. If we can’t tie a claim to a real moment a real person recorded, it doesn’t go in. We’d rather show three solid facts than pad a page with ten shaky ones.
See it in action
Open any of the Cherating videos and look for the “Facts from this trip” table — tap a timestamp to jump straight to that moment in the creator’s video. The creators are also credited on our attributions page.
Browse the videosSpotted a fact that looks off? We genuinely want to know — accuracy is the whole point. Prices and opening times change, so we mark anything indicative and last-check our notes regularly.