Every travel site claims to be accurate. Here's the specific, occasionally tedious process behind ours — including the mistakes we found in our own first draft.
Most travel content today is a rewrite of a rewrite. Someone visited a museum in 2019, wrote it up, and that paragraph has been paraphrased by a dozen sites since — including, increasingly, by AI tools that summarize those same paragraphs without ever checking whether the museum still exists in the form described. We wanted MEVAYA's data to work differently: every opening hour, every closed day, every booking rule traceable to a source we can name, checked against the current year rather than whichever year the original blog post happened to be written.
That's a bigger commitment than it sounds like, so here's what it actually looked like in practice, city by city, including the places we got it wrong on the first pass.
The bug that started this
Early on, we found that Barcelona's Tibidabo amusement park was marked as open every day of the week. It isn't. From September through June it runs weekends and scattered public holidays only; a Tuesday visit finds locked gates. The data had been sitting there, confidently wrong, ready to route someone across the city for nothing.
That one bug changed how we worked. We stopped trusting any single source — including our own first pass — and started cross-checking every attraction's actual weekly pattern against at least one independent source before publishing it. We also went back and searched every other city for the same failure mode: a seasonal or limited-days attraction modeled as permanently open. We found one more, in Vienna — the Prater funfair — and confirmed on closer inspection that it wasn't actually a bug there; the fairground genuinely runs 365 days a year, unlike Tibidabo. Same question, opposite answer, and the only way to know which was true was to check.
The data had been sitting there, confidently wrong, ready to route someone across the city for nothing.
What 'verified' actually means here
For each of the 377 sights across our ten cities, we checked current opening hours against an official source where one exists — a museum's own booking page, a government heritage-site listing — and against at least one independent secondary source when it didn't. Where the two disagreed, we searched further rather than picking one arbitrarily; more than once, the disagreement itself turned out to be the real story.
The Colosseum and Roman Forum, for instance, look like they should share identical hours — they're managed together and sold on one ticket. They don't: the Forum opens half an hour later than the Colosseum, a genuine quirk rather than a data error, and worth knowing if you're timing an early morning visit around one or the other.
For restaurants — 2,376 of them across the ten cities, each within 350 metres of a stop on our routes — we went further, because restaurants close down and change hands far more often than museums. We pulled live data from OpenStreetMap and cross-referenced it directly against the underlying map data rather than trusting a spreadsheet summary of it, which is how we caught cases where hours had been recorded but not actually extracted correctly. Where a venue's opening hours genuinely couldn't be confirmed anywhere, we don't guess — we say so, and we don't recommend eating there without a caveat attached.
The finds that would have quietly broken someone's day
A few of the corrections mattered more than others, because getting them wrong wouldn't just be an inconvenience — it would derail a day someone had actually planned around them.
Munich's Olympiaturm has been closed since June 2024 for a structural overhaul, with the most recent official estimate pointing to early 2027. Our first draft had it open, hours and all. Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo is genuinely closed on Mondays — our data said it wasn't. Istanbul's Archaeology Museums are, contrary to what several existing guides claim, open every single day — we'd initially marked them closed on Mondays, which would have turned away visitors from a museum that was actually welcoming them.
None of these are exotic edge cases. They're exactly the kind of specific, checkable fact that separates a route someone can actually follow from one that looks plausible until they're standing in front of a locked door.
What we still don't know
We're not going to pretend this is finished. Hours-verification coverage varies a lot by city — Berlin sits at roughly 98% for restaurants near our routes, Istanbul closer to 10%, simply because the underlying map data is far more complete in one city than the other. Where we don't have a confirmed answer, our planner says so explicitly rather than filling the gap with something that sounds plausible. We'd rather tell you we don't know than tell you something wrong.
Quick questions
How often is MEVAYA's data re-checked?
There's no fixed universal schedule — we prioritise by how consequential an error would be and how likely a fact is to have changed. A seasonal opening pattern or a stated renovation end-date gets rechecked before that date arrives; a centuries-old cathedral's basic hours get rechecked far less often than a restaurant's.
What happens when you can't confirm something?
We say so, in the product itself, rather than defaulting to a plausible-sounding guess. For restaurants specifically, if we can't confirm a venue's hours cover the meal window you need, our planner won't recommend it for that slot — even if it's a five-minute walk away and highly rated.