How we check opening hours by hand, and what that actually involves

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.

Of the 387 sights across our thirteen cities, 193 have fixed opening hours — museums, towers, palaces, anything with a door someone locks at night. Each of those 193 carries a dated check against a named source: in some cases the venue's own site, in others a city tourism portal or an independent listing. That source is shown with the stop, so you can check it yourself. The other 194 have no fixed hours to check. 113 are squares, parks, beaches and memorials that are open at any hour; there is nothing to verify there, only something not to invent. 81 are shopping streets, markets and bars, where we show typical hours for that kind of place and label them as exactly that. Where two sources 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 — 2,900 of them across the thirteen 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.

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, and the operator now expects it to reopen from October 2027 (as of 11 October 2026). 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 open every single day, according to the museum's official page at the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism (checked on 7 October 2026) — 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.

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.